The Perpetual Motion Machine: National Co-Ordinating Structures and Strategies Addressing Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
THE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE: NATIONAL CO-ORDINATING STRUCTURES AND STRATEGIES ADDRESSING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA A MISTRA WORKING PAPER 11 August 2021 Lisa Vetten Lisa Vetten is a research/project consultant in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg and a research associate of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies based at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her work on gendered forms of violence has ranged across the NGO sector, academia and the bureaucracy, and has encompassed counselling, research and policy development. Abstract Violence, and the ways it is gendered, have long constituted a serious problem in South Africa. In 2000, Cabinet set up the first coordinating structure tasked with developing a plan to combat this violence, and, since 2011, there has been an expanding apparatus of structures, institutions and processes around GBV. They have, however, been founded in a set of generic – even formulaic – prescriptions that ignore the current state of the South African state. As such, the many plans and structures that constitute the machinery to address GBV are characterised by hasty, ad hoc institutional design, unaccountability and wasted endeavour. Contrasting with these managerial processes, are the anger and grief experienced by the many individuals whose lives are affected by GBV. While this has manifested in the proliferation of popular protest by women’s organisations and other formations demanding action from the state, it has not resulted in a disruption to the myriad processes and institutions that constitute the governance machinery surrounding GBV. Struggles between women within the sector have instead resulted in a politics of bad blood which, while not the sum total of the sector’s politics, works in ways that are powerfully divisive.
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