THE killer's name was Oscar Pistorius.
Many people, in articles or tweets under the hashtag #hernamewasreevasteenkamp, have been reminding us of the name of his victim, Reeva Steenkamp. I want to return to the killer. I want to respond to those who have reframed Pistorius's conviction for culpable homicide as the story of Steenkamp and the many women who die at the hands of men every year. That this violence happens is tragically true: in South Africa, in recent years, one woman has died every eight hours at the hands of a partner or lover. But I believe that focusing too much on this particular victim, her gender and identity, is almost as much of a mistake as failing to tell her story at all.
Oscar Pistorius was last week sentenced to five years in prison for the horrible, painful death he inflicted on Steenkamp when he fired bullets through the locked door of his bathroom. Ultimately, it's believed he will serve only 10 months behind bars, the rest being under house arrest. For many that seemed too lenient; a paltry sentence given a woman's life has been snuffed out. Not fair, we feel. Given what Steenkamp and her family suffered, it's not hard to see why people might want to make this into her story, a women's story. I do not think this is helpful.
I am also uncomfortable with the way it is being talked about as a domestic violence case - not just because the judge found it sufficiently credible that Pistorius did believe an intruder was behind the bathroom door to convict him of culpable homicide, not murder, but because I think we should drop the word "domestic". Violence is violence.
I worry too that we are losing men from the conversation. I worry that I have two sons, four brothers, a husband, and that they should be the ones talking about this. It concerns me when a Guardian piece by Simon Jenkins is disparaged by writers Suzanne Moore and Kat Lister on the grounds that it focused too much on Pistorius and failed to mention Steenkamp's name. Jenkins was perhaps being opportunistic in using the sentencing as a trigger for his thoughts on prison reform, but he was also trying to look at what positive changes might be made in a system that is failing to prevent violence and murder. I am glad that there are men who are up for talking about this.
So, we need to remove the sense that this is a women's issue. Even using the word "femicide", as some have done over the last week, can have this effect. As does writing, as Suzanne Moore did, that this story is "about dead women and who makes them dead". It means that we forget that men are victims of male violence too, as are children of both genders. We forget that there are more men killed by men than women are killed by men. Men should, for their own safety, want to talk about this - the violence that mainly men do to other people.
In a recent talk for the ideas website TED, Jackson Katz, a violence prevention pioneer, said he believed we should not talk about gender violence, because violence issues are "men's issues first and foremost", yet when men see the word "gender", they interpret it as "women's issues".
Katz's point is that "men have been erased from so much of the conversation that is essentially about men" and that stories of male violence often get reframed as stories of female victimhood. He postulates that too often the story "John beat Mary" gets changed into "Mary was beaten by John" and then becomes "Mary was beaten", finally ending up with a tale of victimhood that says "Mary was a battered woman". This progression reminds me a little of what has happened with Steenkamp. Feminist writers have seemed to be reframing the story not as Oscar Pistorius killed someone (the problem being him as the agent of violence) but something uncomfortably close to Steenkamp being a killed woman (where she is the problem).
It's all right to talk about Oscar. And although some complain there is already too much speculation around his rehabilitation and return to sport, I detect little appetite for his return to the track. For the most part, people want to talk about him for the right reasons: because theorising about someone who is guilty of an act of extreme violence is part of the way we work out how to try and prevent other similar acts. People want to talk about the misogynies of sports culture, and why it has produced too many high-profile abusive men. They want to talk about masculinity and how boys are socialised; the way the societal structures and attitudes of South Africa - of and the rest of the world - shape men.
Hence I don't really want to talk about Reeva Steenkamp. I don't think that will help us. She wasn't the problem. Pistorius was. Whatever drove him to fire bullets through a bathroom door to the person behind it was the problem. Femicide is not the problem. Killing, mostly done by men, is.
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