{"id":9466,"date":"2011-01-17T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T23:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=9466"},"modified":"2011-01-13T00:04:33","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T23:04:33","slug":"a-campaign-goes-viral-to-stop-corrective-rape-used-to-cure-south-african-women-of-homosexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/01\/a-campaign-goes-viral-to-stop-corrective-rape-used-to-cure-south-african-women-of-homosexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"A Campaign Goes Viral to Stop ‘Corrective Rape,’ Used to ‘Cure’ South African Women of Homosexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.\u201d \u2014 Mohandas Gandhi<\/em><\/p>\n

The photograph is not easy to look at, and it\u2019s not clear at first glance if Millicent Gaika, the woman in the photo, is dead or alive. Huge purple bruises surround both of her swollen eyes, and her neck is crisscrossed by a number of open gashes and scars. By now the bruises have subsided, some of the scars have healed, and in court testimony in November Millicent was able to tell a judge about how the man who raped her said, \u201cI know you are a lesbian. You are not a man, you think you are, but I am going to show you, you are a woman.\u201d That man, Andile Ngoza, is now out on the streets, despite being released and re-arrested after the attack on Millicent. His bail this time, for violating the terms of his parole, was set at 60 Rand, or just under $10 USD.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo use a very South African term, I was just so hurtful,\u201d Billi du Preez, a volunteer activist with Luleki Sizwe, tells me. Luleki Sizwe<\/a>, a small, all-volunteer group that campaigns for LGBT people, is based in Capetown\u2019s mostly poor black townships and rural areas. The organization works with and supports women who have been victims of what has fast become a ubiquitous form of\u00a0 targeted sexual violence in South Africa: \u201ccorrective rape<\/a>\u201d against gay women or women suspected of being gay, as a form of \u201ccuring\u201d them. The most disturbing thing about the attack on Millicent is not how rare it is in South Africa\u2014but how common. The organization itself is named after two women who were killed from \u201ccorrective rape\u201d-related health complications. One of those women was the fianc\u00e9 of the organization\u2019s founder, Ndumie Funda.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese crimes have been going on for years already, and we haven\u2019t been getting anywhere,\u201d says Billi. \u201cMillicent\u2019s case has been put off and put off. When the perpetrator, who\u2019s running free, started threatening Millicent again, I decided enough is enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

After years of rallying, marching, and local organizing by members of Luleki Sizwe, what Billi did next was take a shot in the dark. She drafted text to accompany the photo of Millicent\u2019s battered face, and a few weeks ago sent it in as a petition<\/a> to Change.org, a popular social action platform, demanding that the South African Ministry of Justice declare \u201ccorrective rape\u201d a hate crime. What happened next took her, and many others, by surprise. Within a matter of weeks, the petition has garnered over 130,000 signatures from almost every country in the world and is growing quickly, making it the site’s most popular petition to date.<\/p>\n

More importantly, it did the one thing that local organizing had seemingly failed to accomplish\u2014it got the attention of the national media in South Africa<\/a>, and functionally crashed the email servers of the Justice Minster Jeff Radebe, to whom the petition was addressed, and whose Chief of Staff complained<\/a> that, \u201cyou have made it virtually impossible for us to access other emails as doing so is like looking for a needle in a haystack.\u201d<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s far too soon to declare victory (to date the Minister of Justice has not even agreed to a meeting yet with activists from Luleki Sizwe, one of their number one demands), the campaign has resonance far beyond how many of its ten demands<\/a> are met, and should be closely watched for a number of reasons. The virality of the petition, how quickly it was shared on facebook and email networks around the world, points to a growing international constituency for LGBT rights. And the campaign offers a powerful lesson about the capacity for local activists, often with very minimal resources, to quickly reach a broad international audience through smart online organizing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s remarkable with this campaign is how it highlights the discrepancy between perceived power and real power,\u201d Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, tells me. \u201cSpeaking of global power dynamics, there aren\u2019t that many people who have less power than these women. These are poor, black, lesbian South African women. But given the compelling nature of this story, the potential for it to resonate with millions of people around the globe, and a mechanism to connect with those people, their potential power is remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

As far as tactics go, an online petition drive may seem like a feather as opposed to a club, given the gravity of the issue. It wouldn\u2019t be a stretch to imagine Malcolm Gladwell poo pooing such forms of activism, given his much debated skepticism<\/a> of social media\u2019s ability to bind activists together beyond very tenuous and \u201cweak tie\u201d relationships. Indeed most moderately political people, at least in the U.S.,\u00a0 probably sign at least one petition a week that passes through their inbox, given the ubiquity of the tactic. And more often than not news of a petition\u2019s effectiveness (or lack thereof) is never relayed by the sponsoring organization. But \u201ctipping point\u201d moments are by definition hard to predict, and what any good organizer, online or offline, will tell you, is that those fleeting \u201cweak tie\u201d relationships are often just a first step, an entry point in to a more engaged stance on an issue or a deeper relationship with a community of interest. The secret that\u2019s not so secret is that \u201corganizing\u201d is the operative word in \u201conline organizing,\u201d and always has been.<\/p>\n

After all, the \u201ccorrective rape\u201d story has actually been in the news for a while now, and recent highly publicized research has lent shocking evidence<\/a> to claims that women\u2019s groups in South Africa have been making for years\u2014that the country is the rape capital of the world. But as of last month it is likely that few people outside of South Africa, and probably just as few within South Africa, knew much or anything about a group of women in Capetown called Luleki Sizwe. Fast-forward a few weeks, and now a hundred thousand people around the world (and growing) do know. And unlike the mediated one-way access to an audience that press coverage offers, the women of Luleki Sizwe now have a way to communicate directly with their supporters, engaging them further on the issue and on the acceleration of tactics over the coming days and weeks\u2014to force the South African government to finally get serious about combating the scourge of \u201ccorrective rape.\u201d If you haven\u2019t yet, sign the petition<\/a>, and you will most definitely hear more from these women, as it doesn\u2019t look like they are easily bowed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to feel that you are not alone anymore, just two or three little voices in Capetown,\u201d says Billi du Preez. \u201cIt gives hope. Instead of being little mouse voices in the wilderness, we\u2019re going to be lions now, and we\u2019re going to be roaring as loud as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Joseph Huff-Hannon<\/a> is an award-winning writer, and a campaigner with All Out<\/a>, a new global LGBT campaign organization. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 alternet.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The photograph is not easy to look at, and it\u2019s not clear at first glance if Millicent Gaika, the woman in the photo, is dead or alive. Huge purple bruises surround both of her swollen eyes, and her neck is crisscrossed by a number of open gashes and scars. By now the bruises have subsided, some of the scars have healed, and in court testimony in November Millicent was able to tell a judge about how the man who raped her said, \u201cI know you are a lesbian. You are not a man, you think you are, but I am going to show you, you are a woman.\u201d That man, Andile Ngoza, is now out on the streets, despite being released and re-arrested after the attack on Millicent. His bail this time, for violating the terms of his parole, was set at 60 Rand, or just under $10 USD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}