The capital of death by strangulation
22 October 2008, 18:38 (
http://www.capetimes.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=vn20081022121009939C711358)
Excerpts from an article by reporter Jade Witten:
Cape Town had the highest rate of strangulation of women in urban South Africa over a five-year period, a study has revealed.
...
Shahnaaz Suffla, lead author, and teammates looked at the distribution and patterns of homicide strangulation of women in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria.
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Cape Town was the only city where the number of strangulations of women had increased annually over the period studied, from 17 in 2001 to 25 in 2005.
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Suffla said most of the killings occurred in a domestic context in all four cities, suggesting that the perpetrator was an intimate partner or acquaintance of the victim.
"We will continue this project to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of the study as it contributes to the gendered homicide risk profile for a country (SA) which is considered to have one of the highest intimate female homicide rates in the world," she said.
Labels: Cape Town, domestic violence, intimate partner violence
"Man who killed wife over Facebook posting jailed for life"
Having lived in two societies where violence against women is much highlighted and railed against in the media, I am acutely aware of how public perception of domestic violence can be shaped (wittingly or unwittingly) by media accounts.
The story of a man who was recently sentenced to years of imprisonment for the murder of his estranged wife after his having been allegedly humiliated by her on a social networking site, caught my attention not only for the horribleness of what had occurred, but also in so far as the way in which it had been written up. To me, the write-up is problematic on a number of levels:
I find the descriptions of the violence entirely gratuitous. Would it have not been sufficient to say that the attacker had been fuelled by alcohol and cocaine? Any adult can infer that the consequences of violence fuelled in this way would be entirely brutal. Enough said. Why elaborate further on the detail? What is problematic here is that it makes the grotesque the norm. In a manner similar to the ways in which the intricate details of suicides are not published, so too the intricate details on violence against women need not be published and popularised in this way.
Even though the couple had been separated, the news story is not suffused with this fact. It refers throughout to the victim as "wife" rather than "estranged wife". My claim is that this trivializes the separation somehow, as a mere trifle, as something transitory. And this image is problematic in so far as it perpetuates a certain unsympathetic view of women (or men) who leave partnerships, and struggle to be taken seriously in their efforts.
Further, I see this news story as representative of yet one more instantiation of the "this is what happens when you go out on the Net" kind of scare story. The fact here that the victim had used a social networking site is circumstancial, and should hardly be read (nor implicitly flagged) as harbinger of the dangers of life online.
Labels: domestic violence, media, OII, tech
