Apartheid’s ‘rape crisis’: understanding and addressing sexual violence in South Africa, 1970s–1990s

ABSTRACT Although rape in South Africa today is commonly framed as a post-apartheid ‘crisis’, neither sexual violence nor public concern about it in the country is new. This article explores an earlier period of ‘rape crisis’ from the 1970s to early 1990s, when sexual violence became a key topic of discussion amongst apartheid politicians, Black community leaders, feminist activists, and ordinary men and women. Focusing on the township of Soweto, it examines why public concern about sexual violence emerged during this period and how rape was conceptualised and responded to. It demonstrates how multiple and often competing social and political agendas constrained attempts to understand and address sexual violence in the country’s townships: the growth of feminist activism; the intensification of the liberation struggle and attempts to repress it; public panic about crime; and shifting gender power dynamics. These divergent responses to rape reveal the challenges of addressing sexual violence within the contexts of anti-racist movements and competing political struggles. Exploring these longer histories not only addresses a gap in South African historiography, but also helps to develop a more global and comparative understanding of how gender, race, and class intersect in producing conceptualisations of rape and responses to it.

Sexual violence in South Africa today is routinely framed as a 'crisis'.Media headlines shock readers with statements such as 'The Rape Capital of the World' or statistics like 'One in three SA men admit to rape'. 1 This 'crisis' is typically framed as a post-apartheid problem-a consequence of the country's violent and racist past but a phenomenon specific to the democratic era.Yet South Africa's 'rape crisis' is not new.The notorious nature of the current 'crisis' has fostered historical amnesia around previous periods of panic which have episodically emerged in the country since at least the late nineteenth century, each spurred by wider contemporary social and political concerns.This article explores such an era of panic that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s amongst a notably diverse range of historical actors-apartheid politicians, judges, township leaders, feminist activists, and ordinary men and women-and which has largely been overlooked by scholarship on sexual violence in South Africa.Then, as now, newspapers invoked alarm with headlines such as '500 Soweto women raped in five months' and 'Soweto women in fear: the rape crisis'. 2 The following analysis examines why public concern about sexual violence emerged during this period, how sexual violence was understood at the time, and how various groups responded to the problem.It demonstrates that rape was periodically a public issue in apartheid South Africa, but that concerns about rape produced neither a shared conceptualisation of its causes and harms nor collaborative action to address it.Instead, the issue and its roots were heatedly debated, with some tying rape to patriarchy, others to apartheid and racial oppression, and some to male lust.For many Black women, their daily lives exposed the intersecting class, racial, and gendered inequalities that produced their victimisation.Yet few others-neither anti-apartheid activists nor white feminists-acknowledged such intersections.Despite the successful public education campaign launched by feminist anti-rape organisations, long-held rape myths that blamed victims, constructed women as liars, and minimised the harms of rape prevailed.Furthermore, much of the public anxiety about rape did not seem to be motivated primarily by concerns about women's welfare.Instead, public talk about rape was often used to pursue other political or social agendas: to highlight the injustices of apartheid; to reinscribe patriarchal control; or to vilify Black men and/or women.
Exploring these divergent responses to rape reveals the challenges of addressing sexual violence within the contexts of anti-racist movements and competing political struggles.In South Africa, understandings of rape were shaped by the complex intersections of racial and gendered politics at play in the late-apartheid period.To understand these complexities, South Africa's 'rape crisis' must be placed within both national and international contexts.Globally, the country was not alone in facing growing concern about sexual violence; the 1970s witnessed the impressive and since well-documented rise of the feminist anti-rape movement in the west. 3New attention to rape in South Africa was encouraged by western feminism and global shifts in thinking about sexual violence, crime, and race.Yet it was also shaped by national and local specifics: the anti-apartheid struggle; apartheid's power dynamics; and women's intersecting racial, gendered, and economic oppression.Inserting South Africa into wider histories of sexual violence and activism against it challenges the existing literature's western focus.While many scholars have critiqued the western or white biases of the feminist anti-rape movement of the 1970s, few studies have examined how this activism was exported, adopted, or rejected in the Global South. 4 Yet it is in such case studies where we can most clearly see how gender, race, and class intersect in shaping women's vulnerability to sexual violence and attempts to address it. 5oncurrently, this research speaks to a significant gap in South African historiography.Despite the country's notoriety as one of the world's 'rape capitals', historians have said surprisingly little about shifting attitudes towards or attempts to address sexual violence in South Africa's recent past.A few have examined sexual violence during the colonial period, demonstrating how perceptions of rape and its harms have long been shaped by ideas of race, class, and gender. 6Others have explored the racialised 'black peril' scares of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 7Recently, Pumla Dineo Gqola's pathbreaking work has encouraged a theoretical shift across disciplines in thinking about rape, encouraging scholars to understand the contemporary legacies of past rape cultures. 8Yet historical research on sexual violence during apartheid remains scant. 9Social histories of gender, youth, and crime often mention the ubiquity of such violence without making it a central analytical focus. 10We know too little about how South Africans conceptualised, experienced, or responded to sexual violence from the 1940s to the early 1990s.Consequently, understandings of sexual violence in the country today lack proper historicization.Exploring how sexual violence was interpreted in the past offers insight into how it is understood in the present: why particular rape myths endure; why conversations about rape are so often fraught; and why attempts to address sexual violence have been so fragmented.
A key exception to this lack of historiography is Deborah Posel's work tracing the emergence of sexual violence as a public and political issue in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Posel argues that, beyond small white feminist circles, rape was largely silenced or side-lined during apartheid by the state and local communities. 11Politically, the issue was subordinated to the perceived larger problems of either maintaining or resisting apartheid.The state did little to address rape and was more concerned with policing deviant than non-consensual sex.Seen as a taboo and shameful topic within white and Black families, most sexual violence was hidden from public view.Consequently, Posel contends, 'there is little … by way of an established historical account to draw on; even less by way of analysis' when it comes to sexual violence. 12xplorations of many archives support Posel's argument; there are few mentions of sexual violence in the files of apartheid-era women's or welfare organisations, where one might expect to find such evidence, and the records of Magistrate's courts, where most rape cases were tried, have not been widely preserved. 13However, if we turn to other sources, particularly those pertaining to public discourse and social life, we can elucidate a fuller picture of how rape was understood in the past.This research draws on a range of sources: newspaper coverage of court cases, police press conferences, and meetings; readers' letters to newspapers and magazines; the archives of concerned organisations or individuals; and oral history interviews with township residents and antirape activists.The lack of any concerted archive on sexual violence in South Africa necessitates this bricolage approach, drawing less on official sources and more on those reflecting everyday life and concerns.Newspaper accounts of sexual violence are often sensationalised or focused only on the most violent or 'newsworthy' cases, governed by their needs for entertainment and profit.In apartheid South Africa, different newspapers also pushed different political agendas, which were reflected in their reporting on rape. 14Yet historians note the central role newspapers play in creating and disseminating popular rape narratives, which in turn provoke response and shape gender and racial norms.As a historical source, they were 'a crucial arena through which public opinion was shaped and shifting moralities were debated', and can demonstrate how people thought about rape, addressed it, and why. 15he following analysis largely focuses on the township of Soweto-a diverse community home to about one million people officially classified as 'native' under apartheid by the late 1970s, located just outside Johannesburg. 16The township's size, being the largest in South Africa, and its prominence in popular culture and political history, placed it at the centre of discussions about various 'social ills' during apartheid, including sexual violence.Yet the state and media's focus on Soweto when it came to rape was also shaped by long-cultivated racist assumptions about Black communities' propensity for such violence and reinforced ideas of the archetypal rapist as a poor Black man.While there was increasing media attention during these years to certain forms of violence against women in white communities, namely incest within working-class families and attacks against single women living in Hillbrow and surrounding areas, these were not labelled as 'crises'.Archival sources on sexual violence in white communities from the time are comparatively thin.While a contemporaneous reckoning with (and silencing of) sexual violence occurred within the African National Congress (ANC) in exile during the 1980s, this article focuses on discussions occurring within the country, and on the 'everyday' rather than the liberation struggle, which have received less historical attention. 17It first explores why concern about rape emerged in South Africa during this period before analysing how rape was conceptualised and its causes and harms debated.It concludes by examining various groups' responses to sexual violence during these years.

Concerns about rape in late apartheid South Africa
Despite the lack of significant historical research, the available evidence establishes that rape was a substantial problem across South Africa's racial and class groups prior to and during apartheid.The country's violent history of colonialism, racial segregation, and militarisation entrenched sexual violence in white and Black communities.Colonial logic constructed Black women as hypersexual and licentious, and therefore 'impossible' to rape in that 'raping them does not count as harm and is therefore permissible'. 18This thinking led to the institutionalisation of rape against Black women by white men, and a broader devaluing of Black women's bodies and humanity that facilitated intraracial rape. 19The structural violence of apartheid through labour migration, forced removals, and mass imprisonment separated and harmed families, leading to an increase in infidelity, jealousy, and domestic violence, and new masculinities predicated on controlling women. 20Sources demonstrate that many African women who moved to Johannesburg from the 1940s onwards faced various forms of harassment and violence. 21By the 1950s, Clive Glaser argues, incidents of rape had 'reached crisis proportions' and 'young township women … were subjected to astonishing levels of sexual violence'. 22et until the 1970s, rape was not framed as a significant social issue requiring attention.Cases within white communities were scarcely mentioned, while those in Black communities were often presented as another unfortunate facet of township life.Rape was not a primary issue of concern for the apartheid state or police.The only cases which earned significant consideration were those reported between Black men and white women.Sexual violence was conceptualised as a problem of a few aberrant men -predominantly 'thugs' and 'gangsters'-not of wider society.There was very little public discussion of what constituted rape, what was to blame for the crime, or how it affected women and girls.
This changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when rape suddenly became a topic of concern amongst disparate groups.In 1979, Minister of Justice Jimmy Kruger sparked debate by calling for a mandatory death sentence for convicted rapists, stating that he would 'do everything I can to see that women do feel safe'. 23Around the same time, Progressive Party MP Helen Suzman began regularly asking the Minister of Police, Louis le Grange, to read the country's annual rape statistics aloud in parliament as a means of critiquing apartheid's effects on Black communities. 24In sentencing a migrant labourer for the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in 1978, a Johannesburg magistrate expressed that 'rape cases were increasing at such an alarming rate that black women can no longer move about the streets with the freedom they deserve'. 25The 1970s also saw a swell of reports of sexual violence within white communities, predominantly against young women living alone in Johannesburg flats. 26This prompted the marketing of new selfdefence classes.'RAPE', read one advert, 'DON'T BE NEXT.Start Bob Zager's Self-Defence Combat Course NOW!' 27 Meanwhile, South Africa's first feminist anti-rape organisations were launched: Rape Crisis in Cape Town in 1976 and People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) in Johannesburg in 1979.By 1979, newspapers declared various communities around the country to be in a state of 'rape crisis'.In Soweto, Dr Nthato Motlana, the chairman of the Soweto Committee of Ten, raised alarm about rising rape rates in the township. 28His concerns were echoed by various Soweto doctors, nurses, and social workers, who told reporters that it was not uncommon for women to experience rape multiple times, and that they were growing increasingly alarmed by the rape of children and schoolgirls. 29hese concerns were driven by contrasting motives, with some interested in advancing women's rights, others with challenging apartheid, and many with increasing their control over Black women and/or men.Yet all seemingly agreed that rape was a worsening problem that required addressing.However, according to official statistics, rape was not increasing.Between 1977 and 1984, reported rape rates remained relatively stable, ranging between 14,095 and 15,785 cases each year.In Soweto, annual cases similarly fluctuated between 1100 and 1400 during this period. 30It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that the country would see a substantial rise in reported rapes. 31eminist scholars have long demonstrated the incongruities between the prevalence of rape and reported numbers-with estimates that only between five and ten per cent of rapes are ever reported.In apartheid South Africa, Black women faced additional barriers to reporting: there was deep community mistrust of the police, and women seen speaking to police could be taken as political sell-outs; women were subjected to disbelief or further sexual violence from police themselves; and victims were often financially dependent on their rapists and faced familial pressure not to send men to jail. 32Furthermore, in South Africa and other colonial contexts, concerns about rape had historically been episodic in nature and not necessarily mapped onto rising case numbers, reflecting broader racial, gendered, or economic anxieties more so than genuine concerns about rape. 33o understand why South Africa's 'rape crisis' emerged during these years we must place it in historical context.Globally, the 1970s were a decade of rising anxiety about crime, particularly in racially stratified countries where a discernible marginalised group became the subject of white middle-class fears. 34While this saw many governments taking a tougher stance on rape, such efforts were often informed by racist attitudes that largely cast Black men as perpetrators. 35In South Africa, moral panic about crime skyrocketed in the 1970s and, as elsewhere, was evidently racialised.Whites used stories and statistics of murder, muggings, and rape in the townships as shocking evidence of the believed degeneracy and volatility of the Black population.The decade was marked by alarmist media headlines about rampant violence in the townships, with newspapers proclaiming that such communities had some of the worst crime rates in the world. 36Rather than a social problem with clear causes, rape was portrayed as a sign of moral breakdown and used to justify stricter 'law and order' policies. 37n Soweto, alarm about rape initially developed as part of this wider concern about crime.The township had been gripped by various episodes of crime panic since the 1940s, a new wave of which emerged in the mid-1970s amidst economic downturn, rising unemployment, and widening wealth disparities. 38Anxieties rose further following the Soweto Uprisings of 1976, with fears that students shut out of schools by education boycotts would turn to drugs, robbery, and rape. 39Yet distinct to this new crime panic was the central place of rape within it.Black and white-readership newspapers began reporting Soweto's weekly rape figures alongside those for murder and robbery.In a March 1979 article on township crime, The Argus raised alarm about a recent police statement that an average of ten women reported rape in Soweto each weekend: 'Social workers and civic leaders in black townships claim that some 95 per cent of rapings (sic) go un-solved.And it was not uncommon for raped women to encounter the shocking experience of being raped on more than one occasion'. 40ew attention to sexual violence during these years can also be explained by the rise of feminist anti-rape activism.This sub-movement of second-wave feminism emanated from the US in the early 1970s and pushed for legislative change to rape laws, improved institutional responses to survivors, and changes to dominant attitudes which supported 'rape culture'.Placing rape as a key issue on the women's movement agenda, radical feminists in the US broke taboos discouraging women from speaking about rape and pushed for new understandings of rape as a political-rather than personal-problem, linked to power and violence more so than sex. 41It was not long before the movement spread to South Africa.Anne Mayne, the founder of South Africa's first Rape Crisis centre in Cape Town, was introduced to anti-rape activism through reading feminist literature and then attending the UN International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975 and visiting rape crisis centres in the US. 42After founding the organisation, she and her colleagues embarked on a public education crusade, delivering 110 public talks across South Africa between 1976 and 1979. 43The main messages from such talks were frequently reported in the press; by 1977 there were weekly articles across South Africa's newspapers challenging predominant rape myths and bemoaning the failures of the criminal justice system.This campaign succeeded in making rape distinct from other forms of violent crime in ways that marked a decisive discoursal shift.Meanwhile, early forms of local anti-rape activism were also emerging in township communities as newly formed women's organisations and forums within trade unions turned their attention towards the violence women faced in the streets, at home, and in the workplace. 44s general panic about crime in Soweto receded in the early 1980s, concern about sexual violence escalated.These years were characterised by bold newspaper headlines such as, 'One rape every six hours: Soweto's diary of shame'. 45From 1985 to 1989, public discussions about rape in the township were largely eclipsed by political concerns, as the liberation struggle intensified and the apartheid state retaliated under successive states of emergency.Yet sexual violence, particularly that aimed at children and teenagers, remained a substantial issue.As the struggle quietened towards the end of the decade, rape once again shot into public view with numerous reports about gang rapes of schoolgirls. 46In August 1989, a new form of violence emerged in the township-'jackrolling'-a term used to describe the kidnapping and rape of girls and young women by gangs of young men, often committed brazenly and in public view. 47As South Africa entered its transition era in the early 1990s, Soweto was once again gripped by public panic about rape.

Debating rape
This public concern about sexual violence was met with debate over who rapists were, what motivated their actions, and what repercussions they should face.The following section explores how rape was understood by white feminists, police, community activists, and ordinary men and women living or working in Soweto.While anti-rape organisations pushed for a western feminist understanding of sexual violence, many within Soweto disagreed and vehemently promoted their own conceptualisations.The ensuing debates did not simply see white feminists pitted against Black township residents, however.In fact, divergent perspectives did not fall across any clear gender, generational, or racial divide.To understand these debates, we need to place them within the specific historical contexts in which they occurred and the multiple, intersecting forms of oppression and struggle that motivated them.Doing so reveals how understandings of rape were shaped by both local and international dynamics.In many ways, ideas about sexual violence expressed in Soweto echoed those from other times and places, with victim-blaming common and racial struggles often prioritised above gendered ones.Yet the specifics of South African politics, economics, and gender relations also informed these debates and ensuing conceptualisations of rape.
Through extensive public talks and media engagement, anti-rape organisations such as Rape Crisis and POWA pursued three key aims: reinterpreting rape as an act of power, not lustful sex; reframing victims as blameless; and reconceptualising rapists as potentially any man, not just pathological strangers.While their initial campaigns mainly targeted white audiences, they also attempted to reach township communities. 48uch efforts enjoyed some early success: by the early 1980s, ideas about rape in Soweto were shifting away from long-entrenched notions of attractive women being 'waylaid' in dark streets and fields by knife-wielding thugs. 49In 1979, the Post challenged widely held assumptions that rape only occurs between strangers outside the home, is an impulsive act motivated by sexual desire, and is a minor crime perpetrated only by social deviants. 50peaking to the media about soaring crime in Soweto, Motlana stated that rape 'occurs most often among relatives, friends and associates'. 51Even police stationed in Soweto began to accept this.In 1984, the head of Soweto's Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Brigadier Viktor, stated that most rape victims in the township were 'vulnerable teenage girls' raped by men they knew and cited many incidents in which girls had been raped by their ex-boyfriends, acquaintances, or relatives. 52n February 1981, the Soweto Family Help Centre organised a meeting to address the township's seemingly escalating rape problem, bringing together white feminists, police, medical professionals, and social workers.Pat van Rensburg-the founder of Johannesburg's first Rape Crisis centre-addressed the group.She tackled many commonly held rape myths, including that women 'ask for' rape, or that only young, attractive women are at risk.'Sexual lust is not always the driving force behind a man committing rape', she contended.'When he is angry and wants to show his anger, he always picks on a woman'.Yet Shakes Tshabalala, the director of the Family Help Centre, disagreed.He claimed that there were instances where lust drove a man to rape, giving the example of a man who admires a married woman: 'The sight of the married woman will cajole the man's desire to have sex with her … The slightest chance the man gets-say, when she is walking alone at night-he will rape her to satisfy his lust'. 53hile Tshabalala's views represented one extreme in local understandings of rape, he was not alone amongst Sowetans in disagreeing with the contention of white feminists like van Rensburg that sexual violence was solely tied to a universal patriarchy.Many leaders of the township's civic movement instead linked rape to apartheid policies, arguing that sexual violence was a consequence of the poor living conditions forced upon Soweto residents by racial segregation.Motlana argued that until the state addressed the lack of housing, strict influx control, and unemployment, 'we will be told every day or every week that so many people have been killed and so many women raped'. 54Soweto social worker Martha Taylor similarly blamed rape on apartheid's 'social ills' of overcrowding, lack of recreational facilities, and poor public transport. 55Dr Jiyane Mbere, South Africa's first Black gynaecologist, stated that while rape had reached 'alarming proportions' by 1981, the Soweto community was 'not responsible for the external factors responsible for this'. 56Community leaders at times used concern about rape to push back against apartheid policies.For example, Motlana campaigned against the housing of migrant workers in single-sex hostels and urged for workers' families to be allowed to live in urban areas with them, arguing that hostels would otherwise become hotbeds of sexual violence. 57uch commentators made no mention of patriarchy or gendered power dynamics in their analysis of rape.Feminism was largely rejected by Black activists in the 1970s and 1980s, perceived as a western imposition that was both divisive and distracting to the liberation movement. 58Initial anti-rape activism as practiced by Van Rensburg and other white women certainly was western in its ideology.There was little research on the specifics of sexual violence in South Africa at the time, and white feminists drew almost exclusively on research from America and Europe in their work.As in the US, white activists in South Africa were largely unaware of the intersections between women's racial, class, and gendered oppression, and often failed to see how their version of feminism may not reflect the lives and concerns of those living in townships. 59t is thus unsurprising that Motlana and other Soweto residents differed from Van Rensburg in their understandings of rape.Arguments linking rape to patriarchy may also have sat uneasily with Soweto's leaders, as they entailed laying the blame for rape with half the township's population-its men.This was likely an uncomfortable stance to take during the anti-apartheid struggle.The apartheid state was already regularly denigrating Black men, often by emphasising their purported propensity for violence.Focusing on Black men as perpetrators would have fuelled apartheid stereotypes and bolstered the state's white supremacist project.
Yet in tying rape to racial rather than gender oppression, township leaders implied that sexual violence would inevitably be addressed with apartheid's dismantling, using the same logic followed by the ANC and its allied organisations throughout the 1980s.This thinking also emphasised the harm apartheid caused Black men, removing Black women's victimisation from view.Ellen Kuzwayo, a Soweto teacher, social worker, and anti-apartheid activist, empathised with criminals in her 1985 memoir, asking readers to 'look without prejudice beyond such acts as rape, theft, [and] murder', arguing that such crimes are 'a response which white people would also have shown if they had found themselves victims in a similar situation'. 60However, Kuzwayo's empathy did not necessarily extend to the victims of sexual violence.Speaking about gangsters' harassment of young women in a 1989 interview, she stated that 'to some extent, some girls invite it.And if they don't invite it, they enjoy it'. 61In focusing on the racial victimisation of Black men, both Motlana and Kuzwayo failed to see how such oppression also victimised Black women.This problem continues in contemporary scholarship, where rape is often framed as an issue of Black men's oppression while 'what is left unproblematic is … the ways in which many women are victimized (not just by men but also by the very structures that also victimized black men)'. 62Both white feminists and township community leaders thus failed to see the intersectional dynamics of sexual violence, preferring to view rape as either a gender or race issue, but not both simultaneously.
Other township residents disagreed with both positions.Like Tshabalala, they saw rape as a crime of lust, not a political issue linked to race or gender.Jon Qwelane-a journalist and prolific political commentator-wrote in 1985 that while he was absolutely opposed to apartheid, the system could not be blamed for rape: 'This is nonsense.While apartheid IS to blame for most crimes, does the same hold true for rape-even of toddlers and grannies?… Must we blame the system for even despicable deeds like insane lust?' 63 At a 1989 conference organised to address the emerging Jackrolling problem in Soweto, Sheila Sisulu of the South African Council of Churches stated: 'Yes, apartheid has played a role to many of our problems, but for God's sake where does apartheid come in when your daughter is grabbed from school and gang raped?' 64 Soweto police too denied the links between sexual violence and racial or gendered oppression.Addressing claims that rape was linked to apartheid policies, Brigadier Viktor proclaimed: 'I am not going to be drawn into any socio-economic arguments-I am a professional policeman and my job is to fight crime'. 65Instead, the police largely held illegal shebeens and Africans' alcohol consumption responsible.In 1980, the Divisional Commissioner of Soweto police, Brigadier J. J. Hamman, stated that many rapes were planned at shebeens, with most victims being women who were confronted by 'sex addicts' on their way home. 66Major Othniel Mazibuko further complained that women raped on their way home from shebeens could rarely identify their assailants due to their drunken state. 67rdinary township residents also weighed in on these debates by writing letters to local newspapers with their views on rape and its causes.Overwhelmingly, their letters lay blame with women and their behaviour.Gladys, from the nearby township of Katlehong, wrote to the RDM in 1979 that 'girls' were to blame for the recent 'crime wave' and asked women: 'How many lives or rapes have we caused going out at night?' 68 'Pinky' from Soweto similarly implied that women, not men, were the gender at fault.Claiming that drink was 'destroying our nation' she stated: I am thinking particularly of our women who take to drink … looking for boyfriends to buy them liquor.After drinking, these men take the women into the veld [field] for sex and are then accused of rape.Let the men be warned: Don't trust these women, for they are lower than snakes. 69iting to the Soweto News, an eighteen-year-old woman argued that 'the girls themselves are to blame … Girls go around asking to be noticed, trying to seduce men and when the ultimate happens they are frightened to death'. 70Claiming that it was women who needed punishing for their actions, Ben from Welkom wrote: I pray and beg the Government to stop arresting men because they rape the girls … Girls must stop wearing short skirts.They should try to hide their bodies and stop teasing us because if you pull a tiger by its tail it will attack you … I'm not encouraging rape but I'm marking the mistake.Girls ARE WRONG.I beg the Government to punish all those girls who are raped for exposing their bodies. 71itiques of women's clothing were made by women too, such as 'Worried Chick' from Pimville who was 'convinced that most seductions and rapes are caused by such attire'. 72ultiple commentators suggested that by wearing revealing clothing, Black women were falsely imitating western culture, while others blamed rape on modernity and longed for 'the days' when women covered their bodies.Yet a few commentators contested such views.Joyce from Orlando East wrote to Soweto News: 'Why blame the women for the many rapes taking place in our black society?… Why should our black brothers despoil us because we like to be modern?' 73 Another reader calling herself 'westernised girl' wrote, 'In the olden days the traditional clothing of unmarried women exposed their bodies more than modern dress does.If we wear what was worn in those days I am afraid the rate of rape will be higher'. 74ttributing rape to women's behaviour and attire is, of course, not unique to South Africa.Yet in ascribing rape to men's uncontrollable lust and women's provocations, these townships residents were, inadvertently, entrenching colonial stereotypes of Black men's propensity for violence and Black women's promiscuity.Understanding why both men and women would do so is challenging.Turning first to men, we must ask if this publicly expressed worry about rape was primarily motivated by concerns about women's welfare.Narratives about rape always have wider import and, as Jacqueline Rose argues, 'raising violence to the surface of public consciousness is not always transformative in the ways we would want it to be'. 75Many within township communities seem to have used new concerns about rape as an opportunity to reinforce male control at a time of women's increasing independence. 76As Lisa Vetten argues, 'public outrage about rape has less often been motivated by pure concerns with women's rights than efforts to control and regulate'. 77By framing rape as a problem of women's behaviour or 'westernisation', men could fight shifting gender norms.Furthermore, by focusing on women's public conduct, these commentators reinscribed rape as an act of strangers, not those men closest to women or living in their homes.This sends a clear message: 'the city is a dangerous place for women, when they transgress the narrow boundaries of home and hearth and dare to enter public space'. 78he views of women expressed above, on the other hand, demonstrate the complex intersections of race and gender at play in apartheid-era townships.In examining why some Black women generally sympathised with rape perpetrators rather than victims, it is helpful to turn to Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on race and gender-based violence in the US.She provides two useful explanations.First, women who regularly encounter the threat of sexual violence themselves may criticise rape victims' behaviour and look for evidence that they were somehow responsible-that they 'asked for it' by walking alone, drinking, or wearing inappropriate clothing-as a means of diminishing their own vulnerability.Second, Black women often face a difficult choice between their inseparable racial and gender identities: do they support antiracism and challenge harmful stereotypes of Black men as rapists, and thus deny the threat of intraracial rape; or do they accuse and critique Black men as rapists and risk being seen as disloyal to their communities? 79uch intersections were initially overlooked by the predominantly white 1970s anti-rape movement in South Africa, as they were in America too. 80But in South Africa, Black women's relationship to feminist activism was further complicated by the positions they occupied within the apartheid state and the struggle against it.For Black women, the white state was the primary 'patriarchal enemy', not Black men. 81Furthermore, with many women financially dependent on their sexual partners, exposing rape within relationships could mean losing a family breadwinner.Within the context of the anti-apartheid movement, women who denigrated Black men through rape accusations could be accused of jeopardising the struggle.Such fears have led to a downplaying of sexual violence within Black communities, particularly in the ANC, and to this day continue to silence histories of rape within townships and the liberation movement. 82However, there was no parallel anxiety about widely condemning Black women as a group; blaming them collectively for sexual violence drew no apparent criticism of sowing divisions or undermining the struggle's cause.
Despite these constraints, some Soweto women did speak out against rape during these years.They emphasised the ubiquity of sexual violence, and how fears or experiences of rape shaped their everyday lives.In a 1981 article for the RDM, Soweto author Miriam Tlali wrote that 'virtually all black women, from small children to grandmothers and great-grandmothers, live in perpetual fear and are haunted by the lurking shadow of possible personal defilement'.A nurse Tlali interviewed likewise stated that 'the curse of rape is almost unavoidable for all women in Soweto'. 83Unlike other local commentators, Tlali emphasised the emotional and psychological harms of rape: 'The trauma of such an experience resulting in tragic, long-lasting personality disorders and emotional scars, cannot be over-emphasised', she stated. 84uch women's understandings of rape differed from those of white feminists.When interviewed by the RDM about sexual violence in 1980, several Soweto women clearly expressed how it was the junctures of their racial, gendered, and class oppression, and their positions as Black women in apartheid's racialised capitalist economy, that produced their vulnerability.Many worked in white areas and had to commute long distances each day, leaving home early in the morning and returning late at night, typically alone and in the dark.Iris Phara spoke of her constant fear when leaving for work.'There should be something done to protect us', she pleaded, 'Every week I hear of another [rape] case'.Sylvia Boyane explained how most women could not afford taxis and thus had no choice but to walk.Addressing racial disparities directly, one woman highlighted, 'You white women just pick up your phone in your home and you have a taxi.We have to run into the streets'.A schoolgirl interviewed said that she had heard of many girls who were raped when hitching lifts to school because public transport in Soweto was so poor. 85Apartheid working conditions also meant that many mothers were forced to leave their children unattended during the day, leaving them too at risk of sexual violence. 86In highlighting such issues, these women articulated an intersectional understanding of rape that both white feminists and township leaders largely failed to recognise at the time.

Responding to rape
Increased concerns about rape during these years prompted various responses, none of which went far enough or gained sufficient support to be effective in reducing sexual violence or helping its victims.In Soweto, the first official line of response were the police, whose efforts to address rape were lacklustre at best and counterproductive at worst.In pursuing their primary tasks of enforcing apartheid's racial legislation and suppressing political unrest, they consequently failed to tackle intracommunal crime and alienated most township residents.At a time when anti-rape campaigners were demonstrating the extraordinary underreporting of sexual violence, the police did the opposite, and insisted that most Black women who reported rape were lying.In 1977, Colonel PJ Visser of the Soweto CID claimed that 80% of rapes were false reports made by women cheating on their husbands. 87Defending the police's humiliating interrogations of rape complainants, Brigadier Viktor stressed that such questioning was needed to 'ascertain the truth'.'It is no use proceeding with a case', he stated, 'if you find out that a woman who slept out with her boyfriend wants to claim to her parents that she was raped'. 88In making such claims, the police were contributing to a long history in which white men constructed Black women who reported rape as liars as a key means of reinforcing racial power and the 'unrapeability' of colonised women. 89Beyond arresting suspected rapists, the police mainly advised women to modify their behaviour: to avoid private paths and short-cuts; not drink in shebeens without an escort; and never hitchhike. 90For women who were attacked, police advised that to make a case against their rapist, there should be visible signs of struggle and witnesses who could support their claims in court. 91he police caused further harm through their treatment of women who reported rape.In 1982, Soweto News asked its readers whether women should report rape at all.One woman, a rape survivor herself, wrote that while the police had been rude to her, she was glad she reported; her rapist was taken to court and sentenced to eighteen months in jail.Yet most others said they would not report.Women trying to report often had to do so over general police counters in Soweto's crowded charge offices to unsympathetic male officers who tended to stereotype raped women as either loose or liars.Dorothy, a Soweto widow, 'said she had been shattered by the callous reaction of police when she took her daughter to report being raped'.The police refused to arrest her daughter's rapist because they claimed he was in love with her, and instead suggested they turn to local vigilantes for 'justice'. 92In 1981, 'Mrs.X' was gang raped by young men while walking one afternoon but chose not to report the rape.'What's the use?' she asked.'You go there and try to report and you become a centre of attraction for curious prying young policemen who keep on coming one by one asking you silly questions in the presence of everyone'. 93n the absence of any committed response from the police, some Soweto residents took matters into their own hands.Since the 1960s, Soweto school students engaged in territorial disputes with local gangs organised reprisals against gangsters who preyed on female students through sexual harassment or rape. 94In the 1980s, young 'comrades' engaged in the liberation struggle also sought out and punished gangsters who attacked young women.However, such responses could cause further problems for women.Some young male activists used their political status to abuse girls or to proclaim ownership over the female students they protected.The comrades were often reluctant to punish their own and, in some cases, intimidated girls raped by young activists to remain silent. 95he other group in Soweto who acted against rapists were the makgotla, a series of home guards and people's courts first formed in 1973 who patrolled township streets, judged criminal cases, and meted out punishments. 96They were largely a conservative group of older residents, consisting of both men and women, who blamed wayward township youth for crime.Their response to sexual violence was contradictory.On the one hand, they criticised ineffective policing and often apprehended and punished young rapists.In April 1978 the group were praised for detaining a local youth who had raped a fifteen-year-old girl and handing him over to the police. 97Letatsi Radebe, one of the founders of the Naledi makgotla, explained: If a man's daughter has been raped by a thug, he'll always come to us … we call the parents of the thug who has raped the child … If we should find out that this boy was undermining his family, then that boy, we give him lashes.He must get six lashes or twelve lashes and pay the … cost of this child going to the doctor. 98t makgotlas were also deeply patriarchal and took a hard line on women's behaviour.Following reports that rape was increasing after the 1976 Soweto Uprisings, the Naledi makgotla introduced a new plan to 'crackdown' on rape and declared that 'all girls under 18 not indoors by 8pm will be sjambokked [whipped]'. 99In other cases, the makgotla beat up girls who refused to name their rapists or who were thought to be engaging in 'truancy' and 'messing around with boys'. 100While the makgotla took action against rapists, their initiatives thus did little to support women or shift societal attitudes about rape.
By the start of the 1980s, there were no special facilities for rape victims in Soweto.The main hospital, Baragwanath, only offered basic medical examinations by a district surgeon; it had no special rape unit or support services. 101Soweto's social workers increasingly raised concern about the long-term psychological harms of sexual violence, and the secondary trauma many women faced in reporting rape.Some pleaded for better street lighting in the townships and for the government to introduce female magistrates, district surgeons, and police. 102In August 1980, the Soweto Family Help Centre, concerned about the 'alarming number of rapes' in the township, brought together several organisations to address the problem. 103In February 1981 they organised a meeting attended by local social workers, nurses, teachers, and police who came together to form the Soweto Rape Crisis Committee (RCC). 104The RCC planned to work with authorities to improve victims' treatment, to educate school children about rape and how to report it, and to provide counselling to rape victims and accompany them to police stations to report. 105However, no traces of these planned activities can be found in the archive.By 1984, the Committee was defunct, having never received the community support it needed to get off the ground.The first specialist rape unit for women in Soweto would only be opened at Baragwanath Hospital in January 1992. 106he group notably absent from this discussion thus far are women's organisations.A full history of women's anti-rape activism in apartheid South Africa is a topic for a separate article.The work of (largely white) feminist organisations like Rape Crisis and POWA was the loudest and most prolific during these years.They pursued two main strategies: an education campaign tackling societal attitudes that maintained rape culture; and establishing support services for survivors.Both organisations faced challenges supporting Black women and engaging Black audiences.Mayne, Rape Crisis' founder, attested that the organisation struggled to support women from African communities during its early decades because its white volunteers could not enter townships without a permit. 107Carol Bower from Rape Crisis recalled that the organisation struggled to recruit any Black volunteers or councillors until after 1994. 108Black women found it difficult to attend meetings or establish their own centres because of segregation laws, the long hours they worked, and their lack of facilities such as meeting spaces, telephones, and cars.In 1984 a spokesperson lamented that 'At POWA we find it very difficult to deal with Soweto cases as the township is far away.It would be better for the community to form a body to deal with the rape problem'. 109lack women were central to an exciting period of growth for trade unions, civic organisations, and women's organisations in townships in the late 1970s and 1980s.These movements offered new space for women to publicly address the issues that most affected their lives.Alongside organising around high rents and service provision, women also raised the issues of sexual harassment in the workplace, gender inequality in the home, and domestic violence. 110In 1986, the Port Alfred Women's Organisation launched a local stayaway after a woman was raped and her perpetrator released by police without being charged. 111The multiracial feminist collective SPEAK regularly addressed rape and sexual harassment in its magazine from 1986 onwards.But beyond this there was little direct activism against rape from women's organisations within the country until the 1990s.In Soweto, women's organisations remained largely quiescent on the issue.Joyce Maselane, chairman of the Diepkloof branch of the Soweto Women's League, said that her organisation had not yet investigated the problem of rape: 'nothing has been done yet, but this is an area of concern', she said in 1984. 112oyce Seroke, secretary-general of the local YWCA, also said her association had not explored the issue.'But I am surprised that nothing has been done yet because the rape situation in Soweto has got out of hand.I feel the problem now needs to be tackled by all women's organisations', she declared. 113It was not until 1990 that the first two anti-rape marches, primarily organised by women's prayer groups and teachers' unions, were held in Soweto. 114rganising around sexual violence was a difficult task for Black women in the 1970s and 1980s for two key reasons.First, the issue was not prioritised within the liberation struggle.Activists tended to focus on issues affecting all Black South Africans, not just Black women. 115Many saw issues relating to sexual and reproductive rights as personal rather than political matters nonessential within the context of fighting apartheid. 116As the country faced successive states of emergency from 1985 to 1989, activists who focused on rape were scorned for ignoring seemingly more pressing issues of shootings, detention, and torture.Phumelele Ntombela-Nzimande, who was active in the Natal Organisation of Women and worked for SPEAK, recalled that addressing rape within the context of the liberation struggle 'was hard.Let me tell you, it was hard.I mean, we were the laughingstock'. 117Although many activists acknowledged the prevalence of sexual violence, it was considered a secondary issue that could be addressed after apartheid had been defeated.Second, compared to white women, Black women struggled to compile the resources, connections, and networks required to effectively campaign around sexual violence.Ntombela-Nzimande recalled, 'you were highly unlikely to mobilise any resources if you are a Black woman, or identify people who can support your initiative'. 118This problem endured in the post-apartheid period as the most experienced and well-connected people in the gender-based violence sector continued to be white women with surer access to funding. 119

Conclusion
Sexual violence in South Africa is not new.Nor is public alarm about it.This research demonstrates that, contrary to arguments that rape was generally silenced or sidelined during apartheid, a substantive public discourse on rape existed in the late 1970s and 1980s.Tracing the longer histories of the country's 'rape crisis' challenges teleological narratives of linear progress or ever-worsening decline which dominate much public and media discourse about rape in South Africa today.It also exposes the cyclical and episodic nature of this 'crisis' and how the framing of sexual violence as a 'crisis' itself can foster amnesia about the longer histories of sexual violence.
The article shows how multiple and often competing social and political agendas shaped attempts to understand and respond to the seemingly growing 'rape crisis' in the country's townships: the growth of feminist activism; the intensification of the liberation struggle and attempts to repress it; public panic about crime; and changing gender power dynamics and resistance against this.The divergent groups living and working in Soweto all agreed that rape was a serious problem but disagreed about what larger issues this was symptomatic of: the inherent degeneracy of the country's non-white population, according to many apartheid officials; a universal patriarchy, according to white feminists; apartheid's racial inequalities, according to civic leaders; and women's truancy and impropriety, according to many men (and women).What almost all failed to realise was that rape was symptomatic of multiple, intersecting forms of oppression and inequality.Today, over forty years since newspapers first declared the country to be in a state of 'rape crisis', dissonances remain in how rape is understood and addressed by feminist activists, state officials, and ordinary people who contend with rape as part of their everyday lives.Exploring these longer histories not only addresses a serious gap in South African historiography, but also helps to develop a more global and comparative understanding of how gender, race, and class intersect in producing conceptualisations of rape and responses to it.