Guns and gender violence - a lethal combination

Victoria [not her real name] thought she had the law on her side when she left her abusive partner and successfully applied for a protection order against him.

According to provisions set out in South Africa's 1998 Domestic Violence Act and reinforced by recently enacted firearms legislation, the order gave the police powers to confiscate the gun that had repeatedly been used to terrorise her.

She also had the full support of People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA), a Johannesburg-based NGO that provides legal assistance, shelter and advice to women suffering abuse at the hands of violent partners.

POWA's legal advisor even accompanied Victoria on the day in September when she had to face her former partner in court to apply for maintenance support for her four children.

After leaving the courthouse, she walked her daughter to the shelter where she was staying. Her former partner followed them for about two kilometers before fatally shooting them both, using the same weapon the police had earlier confiscated.

Just how and why he was able to obtain the gun is still under investigation, but for Carrie Shelver, POWA's public awareness manager, the case highlights the limitations of even the best intentioned laws.

"Legislation can only go so far," she said. "It's really about changing mindsets and changing the institutions that create those mindsets."

The 16 days that fall between 25 November (International Day of No Violence Against Women) and 10 December (International Human Rights Day) have been set aside by the United Nations as a period of awareness raising on the issue of violence against women.

In South Africa the campaign has been seized upon by government and the media as an opportunity to put domestic violence in the spotlight. But NGOs like POWA, which work towards the eradication of violence against women year round, have their doubts about the long-term impact of such campaigns.

"We do support it, but what happens on day 17?" asked Shelver.

Guns And Violence

In South Africa the presence of 3.7 million legally registered guns and an unknown - but by some estimates even larger - pool of illegal firearms has added a lethal dimension to many cases of domestic violence.

According to the Medical Research Council (MRC), a woman is shot dead by her current or former partner every six hours, and such cases rose by 78 percent between 1990 and 1999.

Naeema Abrahams has researched the role of guns in domestic violence for the MRC's Gender and Health Research Unit. Looking at all the female victims of homicide in South Africa in 1999, Abrahams and her team found that one in three were killed with a gun; of those, half were shot by their intimate partner, and 71 percent in their own homes.

The study also found that in 20 percent of cases, the women were shot with a legally owned weapon.

"The men often get a legal gun to protect themselves against crime, but it becomes a weapon used against their partners," Abrahams explained. The study showed that women whose partners worked in the security industry were particularly at risk.

"It's availability," Abrahams noted. "You have a fight, and it's so easy to just pull out a gun. It's different from being stabbed or hit with a fist because women can't protect themselves."

The Domestic Violence Act was intended to give women greater protection but Shelver reports that so far, its impact has fallen short of expectations.

"Women are increasingly quite disillusioned. They say, 'how is this piece of paper going to stop a bullet from hitting me?'"

Recent research into implementation of the Act, conducted by the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), found that police rarely took the step of confiscating weapons from alleged abusers.

Tiny Moloko, POWA's clinical manager, supported the finding. "Quite a few women say they've applied for protection orders but that the guns haven't been confiscated," she noted.

Stricter controls surrounding gun ownership have come into effect in the last couple of years and exclude anyone with prior convictions of domestic abuse from obtaining a licence. The problem, says groups like POWA, is that in many cases women do not report abuse to the police or are intimidated into withdrawing charges, so that a history of violent behaviour often goes undetected.

Lisa Vetten, programme manager for gender violence at CSVR, said there was evidence of a history of abuse in 20 percent of cases where women were killed by their partners, but that women only laid charges in three percent of cases.

"A lot of women are actively encouraged by the police not to pursue charges," Vetten said. "I think not all of them [the police] take domestic violence as seriously as they should."

In many cases, she added, women might not know they had the right to have a gun removed and the police failed to notify them or to proactively confiscate weapons from abusers.

Groups like POWA and Gun-Free South Africa, an anti-gun lobby group, are working to educate women about their legal rights, and provide skills development to police, court officials and health workers who come into contact with women experiencing domestic violence.

Meanwhile, grisly stories about men killing their partners or even their entire families before killing themselves continue to be splashed across the pages of South African newspapers on an almost weekly basis.

Vetten confirmed that cases of intimate femicide-suicide in South Africa have increased and that the proliferation of guns was probably a major contributing factor. But both Vetten and Shelver disputed the commonly held notion that the prevalence of gun violence and intimate femicide in South Africa was simply the legacy of the country's apartheid years.

"Violence against women is a global phenomenon," said Shelver. "Lower levels of such violence exist in countries with better laws to protect women."

Getting Through To Men

According to Moloko, the reasons men gave for shooting their partners were often mundane, but the underlying motivations were the desire to assert power or control. Such motives might have more to do with male socialisation than South Africa's violent history.

The Men as Partners (MAP) Programme, an initiative started by the international NGO, EngenderHealth, and run by a network of affiliates throughout the country, works to challenge male assumptions about gender and encourages men to take a stand against domestic violence.

EngenderHealth's programme manager for South Africa, Dean Peacock, suggested that in a society where men have lost both income and jobs, they might use gun ownership and violence against women as ways to regain their sense of power.

After going through a series of workshops, male participants often began to question their definitions of masculinity, including the equation of manhood with violence towards women.

"I grew up in an environment where beating ladies was the order of the day, and it just made you think it was normal," said MAP workshop facilitator Li Buthelezi. "If I was pissed [drunk] I would just lift my hand and 'klap' [slap] her a couple times - it was just me showing my manhood. After MAP you start seeing women differently; you see them as equals."

Abrahams believed that given the proper allocation of resources and training, the Domestic Violence Act, combined with new laws governing gun ownership, could have an impact on levels of gun violence against women. The key, said Abrahams, lay in the level of commitment to implementation by government and police.

In Shelver's view, it was effective implementation that was still lacking.

"In practice, there are a lot of problems around implementation. The problem is not getting gun removal into the protection order, but in getting police to implement it," she said. "In some cases guns are removed and then handed back."