FemIDEAS

And just to say, I’ll give you a two minute warning on the chat so you know where you
are.
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, so thank you for the introduction, Jess. Yes,
so our work, as our namesake is, is to really just raise awareness on the issue of sexual
harassment across the continent and develop comparative assessments by looking at laws
in other regions as well. That way we can identify gaps and just develop best practice
benchmarks as well. So of course, we had a, in 2020, this is during the COVID time, we took
advantage of doing things online. And so we had three focus group discussions that were supposed
to take place in person, but because of COVID, we had to revert to the online strategy, which
worked quite well, we got the same information. So we had three focus group discussions on
experts on sexual harassment and violence in South Africa. And we identified three groups.
And the first was lawyers, the second was workers, and the third was media. And so I’m going to focus
a little bit more on the information that you were able to extrapolate from the lawyers,
but just to say that the information from lawyers, workers, and media does strongly
intersect with the challenges on gender-based violence and sexual harassment
in South African universities. And I’ll explain a little bit why. And so my next slide.
So under the lawyers focus group discussion, we had three issues that really came out
quite strongly. The first was the vicarious liability that we discussed in detail with
one of the presenters. And one of the pointers was section 60 of the Employment Act, the Equity
Act, which provides for statutory vicarious liability of the employer. And so from these
presentations, I just kind of just had to narrow the things that were of greatest interest. So
I noted that an employer, once informed of sexual harassment, a sexual harassment incident
is required under the code to take reasonable steps and to investigate and address the complaint.
This is not something which is dissimilar to what you find in other laws that exist in
a lot of African countries, where there is a requirement that you have to make the employer
aware of the sexual harassing behavior. And I remember we raised this issue of the additional
burden that was placed on a survivor to report and how this was almost like an escape route for an
employer to just then raise the issue of saying that, well, I was not informed or just not
expressed to me adequately that there was this case of sexual harassment ongoing.
And there are even some policies in universities. There’s one policy that we studied,
where they actually stipulate in that policy that the survivor should have made it
very clear, first of all, to the harasser, made it very clear to the harasser that they’re not
interested, and then secondly, to have reported. So you see this trend of placing this unreasonable
burden on a survivor, and yet at the same time, it’s also coupled by a lack of a structural support
system. We think that if you are going to expect a survivor or potential complainant to take these
measures of reporting, we think there should be an additional burden for ensuring that there are
structural systems in place that support the reporting process, and that if there are not,
there should be penalties that are coupled with that. And this is also what I believe is
a problem within the university context as well. Another issue that was raised was sexual
harassment outside work. This was actually our second presenter at that focus group discussion
who pointed out that just based on the study that she had been doing, that she believed that,
and she was actually referring to the university setting, that there was really just a gap
in terms of defining sexual harassment outside of a workplace. However, my response has been
to that. To that expectation is that I think that the solution really lies in the expansion
of the definition of workplace and who are the different actors within workplace context.
So the power dynamics, for example, an example that I gave is that the power dynamics of,
you know, let’s just say a professor who sexually assaults a student off campus,
those same power dynamics exist within that institution. So, you know, the fact that it
didn’t happen specifically within the university does not take away the liability and the
responsibility of such an institution to intervene and really kind of take responsibility
for the actions of an employer just because it took place outside of a very sort of specific
workplace setting. Yes, so then there are questions of who is an employer, who is an employee. Of
course, in the university setting, you’re also looking at who is a student and the different
categories of students, you’ve got different categories and those also need to be really,
really clearly articulated when you are wanting to have a holistic approach to protecting
all persons around a university. So the next presenter that we had talked about challenges
in the disciplinary system and sexual offenses that occur on campus and one issue that we
looked at was the need to redefine what an administrative process should look like
and the concern of how the disciplinary process in university settings usually took on almost like a
a criminal, sort of it had like a criminal component to it that had some, you know,
disadvantages. I think that the criminal aspect is important to the extent that it really underscores
the severity of the offense, of the abuse that a complainant or a survivor has suffered.
But at the same time, because you are, you know, it’s a disciplinary process, there is an aspect
where you kind of have to tailor, you have to tailor make this process to suit a setting that
may be finding a middle ground between civil and criminal and not purely from the criminal side,
which is very intimidating for many survivors and is actually a hindrance to speaking out.
And so from these three presentations, we just, you know, we couldn’t list everything that the
key issues that came out of there. The first one that I want to be relevant for this discussion
as well was addressing the lack of adequate protection resulting from the definition of
circular harassment, which occurs outside the workplace. I believe that the expansion
of the definition of workplace is very important. And I’m glad that we find that expansion
in international conventions like the C190, which I think really has a very comprehensive definition
of workplace setting. And then reassessing the duty of care versus reputational harm.
These are things that we see repeatedly, where if a university has, maybe any institution really
has an opportunity to protect their reputation and really throw a survivor or victim to the walls
and not, you know, really emphasize the duty of care first, they will do that because they consider
the protection of their institution as most important. Another element to this is, of course,
the reputation of the sexual harasser in question. You know, if it is someone who
brings in a lot of money for the university, someone who is a star academic person who brings
a lot of advantage to the university, there is a tendency to kind of silence the voices.
And so what is the solution there? You know, I find that some of the cases that we’ve studied.
It’s two minutes remaining.
So, yes, and then the other issues, the legality of the use of non-disclosure agreements to settle
with victims of sexual harassment. It is an issue. It’s not as loud as we have seen in other
regions, but it does exist. And sometimes even the culture of a disciplinary process can be a form
of an NDA as well. The confidentiality that they use to ensure that information regarding that
process is not exposed is actually creating more harm because sometimes you find that
a sexual harasser who is an educator within that institution is released back into the teaching
fold. And then you have a next couple of students coming in who are unaware that, you know, you have
a problematic person because of this issue of confidentiality and NDAs. And then the other issue
that was raised specifically in this context was the validity of the provision under the EEA,
which renders the remedy of Section 68 unavailable to victims who fail to report incidences of sexual
harassment to an employer. And the solution was that this was something that had to be investigated
interrogated further. Yes, so one of our presenters at that focus group discussion,
specifically at her institution, education institution, at UCT had talked about how they
had two disciplinary structures. One was for staff who would go through the human resource management
and then one was for the student disciplinary panels. So that has its advantages and disadvantages.
But one issue then again is within the same disciplinary system is that sometimes you would
have like a panel who would be presiding over a disciplinary hearing who basically don’t have the
expertise to deal with issues of gender-based violence or harassment. And so they treat offenses
such as plagiarism, cheating, almost in a similar way as sexual offenses and rape.
And we know this by just looking at the credentials that this person may have
the qualifications to preside over a case that is dealing with plagiarism, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean that you have the qualifications to preside over a sexual offense case.
So then, yes, so that goes back to the panel composition, a problematic area, lack of training
and expertise in the area of GBV. And one other disadvantage being that the respondent’s right to
legal representation, especially if there was the potential of an expulsion, that this is something
you know, this is something that a respondent would likely be privileged to have, unlike the
complainant. And then also, we also saw that there were efforts to tailor-make
sexual harassment policies within educational institutions to tailor-make them and make them
more progressive and to really respond to issues of GBV in a more gender-sensitive way. But then
at the same time, you then see that there are challenges, hurdles in the form of implementation
and monitoring. So the process of revising your sexual harassment policies becomes very difficult
if you’re not able to overcome the hurdle of implementation and monitoring. And who is
responsible for implementation and monitoring? It is an insult to survivors to develop beautiful
policies that speak very well on issues of GBV. But then when it comes to actual
implementation and monitoring, nothing is done. It’s not matching.
Could you, brilliant, perfect, wrap up?
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you so much. That was a fantastic presentation and so full of information,
which I’m sure people will want to unpick during the Q&A. So thank you so much.
I’m going to move over now to the third panelist that we have speaking today,
who is Joel Quirk, who is a Professor of Politics at the University of
Fitz. His research focuses on enslavement and abolition, work and mobility, gender and violence,
historical repair, and the history and politics of Africa. Joel’s most recent co-edited work is
entitled Research as More Than Extraction, Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence
in African Societies. And the title of the paper is Oral Histories of Gender-Based Harms,
Equity and Liability at the University of Bitvartisrand. Over to you, Joel.
Joel, can you hear me okay?
Yeah, we can hear you and we can see your screen.
Excellent. So I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their contributions today
and for this opportunity to talk to you at all about a project which I must confess I’m
slightly anxious and nervous about, because this is the first time I’ve actually presented
on this. This is not my primary area of expertise, but it’s something I’ve taken up in more recent
times and I’m looking to share some preliminary thoughts with you about some of the things I’ve
found. So this project is entitled Oral Histories of Gender-Based Harm and it specifically focuses
on the questions of equity and liability at the university at which I work. And what I want to
specifically do is provide a brief yet hopefully somewhat granular account of the last 10 years of
institutional reforms and efforts that are designed to address gender-based harm amongst
members of the VITS University community. So I’m going to focus specifically on the key office,
the Gender Equity Office, that was established by the university in 2014.
A snapshot of the kinds of things that I think have faced this office in the course of the last
decade. So in terms of the backstory, I’m a white foreign male professor within post-apartheid
South Africa and here we have to recognize that the post isn’t especially post a lot of the time
and VITS as a university shouldn’t be regarded as representative of higher education in South
Africa. More generally it’s an historically white university positioned in the heart of Johannesburg
and it has forms of kind of wealth and positionality and status that differentiated from many of its
other peers in South Africa. So I moved to VITS roughly 11 years ago and as part of that move I
ended up by accident in a department that was the epicenter of sexual harassment scandal at
the university and through a kind of complicated series of events I don’t have time to go into
I ended up firstly as a member of an advisory committee established by the university to try
and address policy in these issues and I’ve more recently been the co-chair of that committee
and as part of my role in this process I’ve been engaged in questions of
policy reform and policy design so I’m not going to pretend to be standing apart from the events
I described. I’m kind of implicated and connected in them in all kinds of ways and as part of that
process I’ve more recently undertaken a new project which is designed to try and capture
the perspectives and experiences of people who have dealt with questions of gender-based harm
within the VITS community. So this project I started last year I’ve so far done 33 semi-structured
interviews with staff, students, executives, frontline service providers within the VITS
community. It’s an insider outsider approach where a lot of the people I’ve talked to as
part of this project are people I’ve known previously, people that I’m connected with
not all of them but some of them. I’m not asking them about theory but I’m instead trying to get
a sense of their perspectives and experiences of the way in which the university is sought to
address questions of gender-based harm. So as part of this process I am in the process of transcribing
these interviews. I then send them back to the people I’ve talked to who get to edit and refine
them and decide whether or not that they’re comfortable with the transcript as given.
I then have to make sure it doesn’t expose any questions of legal liability or deal with questions
associated with cases and confidentiality and I’m proposing and intending and hopefully will later
this year publish these interviews as a Creative Commons online archive and that’s part of a kind
of understanding of how knowledge is constructed and deployed where I want this project to capture
experiences in ways that benefit everyone and not simply the person doing the interview.
I also have some complications in terms of who I can talk to and where my ethics approval
covers or ends and I’m not really in a position to go into the details.
So in terms of what I want to cover this is an extremely brief and superficial dive. I have
more content than I can realistically handle in 10 minutes so I’m hoping to simply cover the top
lines and the top lines start in late 2012 with a report in a student newsletter
which made reference to a professor asking a student for sex and one of the key kind of
elements of the conversation at this time was there was a great deal of uncertainty as to
which professor was the subject of the article and one of the distressing things about this was that
there was no shortage of potential credible candidates. Eventually over the course of a
six-month period and following a front page exposition in the Sunday Times four
members of staff were eventually subject to disciplinary proceedings and the framework
that was used here is the idea of its sex pests. Now there’s problems with the sex pest framing.
It kind of is a diminutive. It kind of implies kind of a kid being a pest and has the kind of
danger of trivializing and kind of reducing kind of the seriousness of the allegations.
Officially these were all members of academic staff and the fact that there was four of them
within a short period of time created a sense that the university as a whole was facing not
simply the euphemistic bad apples, the isolated insolences that can be kind of excused and
minimized as people having individual failings. It was because of the scale and number of the
allegations understood to be a systemic problem. So I’m interested in what happens next. How far
the reforms initiated by the university went and what the questions of design look like. So how do
you design a policy and institutional response to questions of gender-based harm? Now the framing
of gender-based harm to my mind at least is hopefully able to capture more than spectacular
violations of bodily integrity which seem to be the kind of standard of sexual violation
and gender-based violence that everyone in South Africa theoretically agrees they are against but
in practice very comfortably and easily pushed to the side as being something over there but
it’s the larger questions of harm and hierarchy and the abuse of power that at a university such
as this I think a crucial yet uncomfortable conversations to have. So in terms of how
sorry? Three minutes. Oh okay I’m in trouble then. In terms of how this worked we have the idea that
that VITS took this seriously. We have academic members of staff being fired. We have an independent
inquiry. We have the establishment of new institutional architecture and we have a
new vice chancellor who took this as an opportunity to burnish his credentials
in all kinds of ways and was deeply and directly involved in various policies and not always for
the better. We have new policies and given the timelines I’d like to say more about this but
I think I will probably have to skip. We have the establishment of the gender equity office.
It’s designed to have its functions and budget removed from the transformations office separately
located in the vice chancellor which was designed to resolve a problem associated with
reporting lines being compromised by academic hierarchies. You instead create a reporting
line that is entirely separate at least theoretically. The office in terms of its
mandate is designed to kind of transform society, deal with the legacies of apartheid,
deal with questions associated with gender and sexual discrimination and yet it’s historically
had kind of three and a half people and then more recently has kind of a few more but there’s a
mismatch between its capacities in terms of the people working on its mandate and the mandate
itself and as a consequence it’s historically been reduced to a situation where cases,
disciplinary cases, counseling of people who’ve experienced harm become its core business and
there’s invariably as part of this a tension between activism, the capacity of the office
to transform the university, liability, what the legal office says can happen and public relations
where having an office such as this one invariably creates a situation where in addition to having a
mandate to try and address gender harm the having an office is designed as a public relations deploy
which you can point to in order to placate critics or create the appearance of taking something
seriously despite the fact that in terms of resources and capacities there’s a mismatch
between what you say the office does and what it can actually manage. I have a timeline I’m
just going to have to skip and I’ll just maybe summarize given that the time is short a few
points that I think have emerged from the interviews. To be clear I’m not going to quote
from any of the interviews but there are some themes that emerge that I think are worthwhile
highlighting. The first and I think this is the most important point gender equity is much bigger
than cases and counseling and I don’t mean to suggest here that cases and counseling are
important but there’s a sense that having a gender equity office never quite gets to equity
with the intensity and resources that one might hope or expect because 90 percent of the resources
are used up in reactive mode dealing with disciplinary cases dealing with with counseling
so there’s a mismatch there. The second point is that disciplinary proceedings
sorry it’s cut out this is my last slide I’ll be quick
vits disciplinary procedures are handling cases which might otherwise go through criminal justice
mechanisms due to justified suspicion of the the south african police service and prosecution
cases involving academic staff rock star professors have tested institutional systems
to a much greater extent and despite some notable cases where professors have been fired by the
university there remains a huge reluctance to say who they are and what they were fired for
and this includes the case that recently went through the south african ccma took hundreds of
thousands of hours of time and is a landmark case of of gender bullying and harassment where a
professor was fired by the university and that decision was upheld yet the university from its
public relations and and public statements has said nothing about so there’s large numbers of
cases where allegations and disciplinary proceedings remain undigesting and festering
within different corners of the university having a specialized office enables the university to
delegate and deflect collective responsibility by passing all responsibility to this small unit
and then finally and I guess this is obvious already all of this activity can only realistically
capture a small corner of the larger set of issues associated with
gender-based harm at a university such as this
Thank you so much Joel. That was another fantastic presentation. I think what we’re going to do is hand over to
the other Jess on the call to conduct a Q&A and just to say as well there’s been some comments
in the chat about the recording we will speak to Kharata about capturing her presentation as well
so that it can be shared in some way so I think I will hand over now to Jess Bruecke to conduct the
Q&A. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much Jess and Adrija and to the three really outstanding
panelists. When Adrija asked me to kind of help co-chair this event today I
told like gave her a forewarning that this is not at all my expertise. I study boats
but my kind of interest in this topic is from being a student at kind of two big South African
universities and having you know experienced these processes myself and supported friends
who’ve had to go through these processes and being a lecturer and had students go through
these processes and I’ve always found them very difficult and kind of overwhelming and
so what I’m going to do today is take advantage of this panel to kind of ask a question that’s been
plaguing me and just to also quickly say that please those who have questions just to put them
in the chat box and I will kind of get to them afterwards so my question to the whole panel is
is kind of connected to something that Faraha asked what Faraha mentioned in her session about
about this kind of the criminalized overly bureaucratic processes and how really often it is
kind of this criminalized process that makes the survivor or the person coming forward
feel particularly uneasy and I think this is really interesting because kind of often these
often these over overly criminalized or all kind of carceral responses when they do happen
not that they do often are pitched as something that is to the detriment of the accused right
that it’s like kind of overly partial overly criminalized processes can only be to the
detriment of the accused but I think it’s really interesting in that how it can also put off people
coming forward or kind of people naming their perpetrators and so again going back to what
Joel just said about desire like the the policy design of a desired outcome I think is really
interesting and I’m interested in how universities kind of come to this idea of what a desired
outcome is in these processes and kind of going back to the very beginning to Harata’s you know
we saw these incredibly moving images in your presentation and I saw myself in one of them which
was kind of weird lying on the vits floor in my really ugly beige bra but I think it’s you know
moments like that where where students are coming together calling for something demanding something
wanting justice but not always and I say not always because I know that very often they do
know exactly what they want but not always knowing what the desired outcome is
and I think I’m kind of particularly interested in this as I’m very interested in how theory
travels and I know Ruth Wilson Gilmore just visited South Africa and abolition is very topical
but I think that you know how kind of these anti-castro feminists talk about abolition
in the north is not doesn’t always fit to our context in the south and doesn’t always fit to
our context in South Africa and so I think I’m really interested in hearing more from the three
of you on this idea of a desired outcome to these processes which I which I know is a big question
but like I said I’m taking advantage of of the expertise on the panel so Harata are you kind
of okay to to go first I’d also just like to say I know often in these panels it’s not a lot of time
is given to speak to each other and I did see in the chat that there was you know a lot of overlap
so if you’d like to kind of speak to each other as panelists that’s also that’s also great
um okay so I would say when it comes to desired outcomes and I’m assuming that you relate you’re
referring to a disciplinary process when it comes to a desired outcome you have to look at it from
two perspectives in fact there are two perspectives um actually there are three but sometimes the
perspective of in an educational institution and sometimes a very influential um multinational
organization there should be three perspectives but the two get merged and confused you know
um so the perspective um and the expectations of uh the accused um the perspective and expectation
of the institution um can can become blurred you know uh because both of them may have
um a tendency to want to protect the institution and that is where a victim or complainant often
finds themselves very uh sort of at a disadvantage um in educational institutions there is also uh
you know when you kind of blend in the criminal overtones of a disciplinary process um you may
find that uh the burden of proof that is applied um may not work in favor of a um of a complainant
not that necessarily that it should but then it’s also about fairness uh because if you are
applying for example a burden of proof that um that that includes that that way you’re using
the standard of proof beyond um proof beyond reasonable doubt uh then you’re really expecting
that process to to um to use a standard that is you know the same as a you know criminal court
case you know and in that process you have a complainant a student who doesn’t have the same
tools the same access to legal advice and legal support that the institution has itself and that
the um that the accuser may have um and then the the other burden of proof would be of course the
balance of probability so this is why i think that there has been recommendations that a
disciplinary process should be something that is more tailored to um towards uh using that standard
of um uh what you know balance of probability but because the process itself you know is really
layered with um very protective mechanisms and protecting the the institution sometimes it’s
really difficult to really get key insight from from the outside in terms of what standards are
they using but then also even if you’re applying the proof beyond a reasonable doubt it should be
clear that proof beyond reasonable doubt does not necessarily mean it should not equate to proof
beyond a shadow of a doubt and uh sometimes that is a mistake that the institutions make when they
are you know conducting these disciplinary processes and usually it’s quite deliberate as well
yes thank you um Joel have you had a moment to read Anna’s question in the chat
no no that’s that’s fine it’s kind of related to my question and i was sorry yes no do you want me
to to try and bundle them or if you if you can otherwise i’m happy to really do one and we can
come back to it i do think that they’re they’re linked but yeah so i i i kind of did the the
the rubbing two fasting and and that invariably ends up in a situation where we’re kind of some
of the the the nuance drops um in terms of the kind of overlap between uh internal disciplinary
proceedings and and criminal proceedings there’s obviously things you can do through an internal
proceeding that you can’t do through criminal proceeding you can kind of move people to different
residences you can uh engage in in in a kind of no communication or contact order that there’s
kind of remedial measures that that can be implemented um immediately on on a kind of like
now now timeline rather than the types of laborious extended processes associated with criminal
justices so so i wouldn’t want to suggest that one is is a substitute for the other they have
kind of different competencies and they can be employed in different ways um at the same time
i i also think that your conception of desired outcomes is tied to a set of expectations about
what is realistically likely to occur um and and if you have diminished expectations
of your institutions and and south africans are very good reasons have diminished expectations of
the south african police service and criminal justice service um it kind of constrains your
understanding of what a remedy might look like um so so i do think like that there’s a critique
that that can and should be made of kind of you know punitive castle solutions but people are
selecting their desired remedies in a context where all the options are realistically on the table
and as a consequence of that you can end up where what do you really want well i would really like
to just be left alone um and and i think one of the biggest problems we have is that in terms
of desired outcome people would really desire to not have someone else go through the same trauma
that they experience and and we have huge problems in south africa due to these considerations around
liability where members of academic staff get fired for roasting misconduct and gender bullying
and harassment and they go and get other jobs and and and students get fired for similarly
egregious conduct and and they go and re-register at universities just down the road and and because
the these proceedings remain confidential and and there’s no record that is easily discoverable
and circulatable um there’s a very high chance that you’re kind of setting up a situation where
people will kind of reoffend in another context um so so i think it’s complicated i do think that
the whole idea that everyone needs to go to to to jail has been necessarily unjustly complicated
but the kind of transitional justice mechanisms that people often celebrate
uh aren’t perfectly chosen in in a free context they’re also tied up in a a limited set of
expectations of institutions
thank you thank you joe yeah really oh sorry sorry i was just saying thank you i’ll post if it’s not
um too much uh um self-advertising i’ll post a link to the project that erin and i’ve just been
working on in case because i think it’s one of similarity thank you
um just can you just rephrase your question um or just no no that’s fine i i think when i’m
i i’m thinking about desired outcomes but when i i’m thinking about your presentation
i think it’s kind of these two two things that come to mind one is i’ve always been so interested
in the ru references particularly in why roads like why it happened at roads and i find that
incredibly interesting whereas you know this is like joel has explained and in my experience at
uct it’s not an issue that i think is specific to any one institution in south africa but really
university currently known as roads was was this space where it kind of exploded and where you know
students and feminists really pushed this issue and i and i i’m interested to hear your thoughts
around that and then i think kind of when i am thinking about desired outcomes in the context
of the ru reference list is as students and activists and protesters you know was there any
clear insight into what it was that they were you know demanding more than just this overwhelming
desire to feel safe which i think is always you know difficult to to articulate in policy
which of course is is the desired outcome so i think that is
kind of broadly my questions to you if you’re able to to respond cool um so in terms of like
why roads i think that at the time there was a lot of um mobilizations which meant that
our protest got a lot of attention um so i think there’s it’s partly about how we
organized and the fact that we had in collaboration with um other students at
uct and stellenbosch we’d planned this campaign um under the banner chapter two one two so
there had already been before like the explosion of re reference list there was this coordinated
um campaign to stand up against like university administrations on this issue
and then when the list of names went viral i think that part of what caused the response
was the way the university had responded to the chapter two one two campaign which was that they
it was like a poster campaign where we had all of these posters that talked about rape culture
being institutional and rhodes university hiring perpetrators them being student leaders
um that sort of thing so those posters were taken down twice and i think that even though it was
like a physical display like outside the library rhodes is and was at that time a very digitally
connected campus so there’s this kind of like and and these events were publicized so when
the university responds by taking down the posters everyone is observing it digitally um which i
think caused a lot of anger and then you know coming off of the fees must fall protests maybe
seven eight months before there was also an understanding that when there’s a problem we’re
going to protest so how are you reference list happened according to my memory and like my
readings and stuff was that in the same vein as fees must fall protests there was like a student
body meeting called and that’s how people ended up gathering um and you know the it’s very much a
fallist protest in that when fees must fall happened and there was the campus shutdowns
that became how we organized um so i think like those are the things that made it
such a big attention grabbing kind of protest um or at least some of the things and i think that
also like our digital our digital activism has been a significant part of this um story because
we’ve kept the narrative of the story alive through continuous mobilization um broadcasting
different um different movements and anytime something happened um for instance most of the
times yolanda janti had a court hearing we would mobilize and make sure that people on twitter knew
about it um so and in that in that way we also got connected to media and that’s how the story
grew and was sustained um and in terms of demands um yeah it’s it’s a big can of worms and in terms
of like anticipated and desired outcomes one of the main things that i think never happened at
rhodes university which might have changed the course of the protests is that the university’s
narrative around the protests made it seem that they were not implicated directly by us like
saying that you are the problem the problem is with the administrations ineptitude around this
um and the way they tell the story is around you know we support genuine sexual violence protests
but we are against criminal elements so there’s already like a criminal criminalization of protest
movements there was interdict taken out preventing us from shutting down campus and the difference
was that students felt um there wasn’t an acknowledgement that they were implicated in
the in the problem and also they were limited in that one of the things that they they responded
to a lot of the demands that were set by the students but they refused to suspend the people
who were named on the list which then prolonged the conflict and the protests between students
who are protesting and the administration because to us it was like we have enough
communal knowledge that these people are perpetrators of violence and we’d like to
see some action taken against that whereas the the university couldn’t do that because
they needed them to go through the fair disciplinary hearing um so i think in terms of
what what the protest says to me about outcomes is that the
the disciplinary hearing is a contested way to deal with this um because what students wanted was
something that the university i don’t think could have given us in terms of belief belief like you
know there’s that um you know mantra like belief survivors and for us to believe would have been
to have action taken against these people on this list without having to go through hoops to prove
it so there’s there’s questions to be asked about what the university can do um given that they have
other interests to protect right um yeah those questions are being grappled with and i’m not
saying that i’m not saying that to absolve the university of what i think was a failure to
deal with the problem in a caring manner but i am saying that like because of the university’s
interests it’s difficult it would have been almost i would almost say like
we can’t expect of them to meet some of the anticipated outcomes because some of those are not
possible in the structure that an institution and i think that just goes back to what Joel is saying
as well it’s like we can we can talk about desired outcomes theoretically but of course
those are always going to be impacted by the actual capacity that are you know the capacity
of the institution to deliver a various set of outcomes and i think there’s a there’s a
really good question here by um i think it’s way where emu and i and i hope i’m saying it correctly
but i think that this this question is particularly interesting because i was thinking about it as
well i’ll read the question up now to kind of throughout all three talks you know for i had
just kind of opened up with these sessions done between three different groups right there’s
lawyers students workers i think when we think of the university and the different stakeholders
that the university has it’s easier to it’s easy to think of these stakeholders as kind of pushing
against each other but really when you kind of think about this very complicated workspace
you know sexual violence is experienced by people in all you know people in all these
different groups whether it be workers or students or faculty or you know staff members it it’s kind
of it’s not just an issue that is experienced among student groups or kind of between student
groups it’s it’s a complicated one and so Romu asked that i know that you all speak about
institutional failures but they’re wondering if anyone has any insight or examples of how these
failures have affected organizing and protests so specifically looking at trust or accountability
or vulnerability and again they are someone that participated in our reference list and their
observations have been that the difficulty of organizing and solidarity across these social
or geographic differences due to the lack of trust between between the groups and i think that’s
a really really interesting question and one that i was thinking about in terms of kind of workers
students lawyers as these three separate groups but you know what are the what is what are the
opportunities the kind of relationships or solidarities between them so this question
is not addressed to anyone specifically is any one of the three panelists kind of
have a response to this idea of kind of organizing across differences on campuses
um i’d like to take a stab at it especially because of are you reference list i think
um are you reference lists and i think these must fall broadly um brought up a lot of
conflict amongst organizers and this is something that i have been impacted by i think a lot of us
have been impacted by because i think it would be very difficult for the same group of people
for the same group of people to ever try stage the same kind of movement again
because a lot of those relationships have broken down and i think that like also i mean
the content the cohort of people who were protesting at the time were like
like 17 to 23 year olds right and i think with the passage of time i’ve become aware of how
we really were not prepared for kind of what we were doing and also like some of the problems
around trust around accountability you know it it would have been great for
us to not even have to have those protests because encountering those issues was really
difficult and i think that like we couldn’t really have been prepared given that we were like mostly
fresh out of high school um and in terms of like thinking of future organizing which is something
i’m still invested in and thinking about the continuity of movements it’s important for
people to also think about um different levels of of relationship so it’s straightforward to me
to protest against the university administration because they kind of have a specific mandate that
they have or haven’t met and i can call them on that right but the difficulties that i think
are related to organizing as Wairimo is pointing out is that there’s a lot of
things that we need to be aware of in terms of like horizontal relationships so if a community
member within the protest as what happened with rape at Azania is accused of rape then what happens
and because we were looking um hierarchically at the superstructure i think it’s difficult
to maintain relationships and maintain you know solidarity amongst ourselves when we don’t really
have a um point of reference for how to deal with interpersonal issues within the movement and i
think this is where abolition and abolition feminism really starts to look towards that
because a lot of the justice um literature from that perspective seeks to think about
the capacity for everyone to harm and what needs to happen in order to have repair within um a
marginalized community no i mean that was a it’s a brilliant answer and it kind of made me think
back to how you know Joel opened up his his paper with kind of acknowledging the tensions and the
complicities and kind of his subject position too and i mean i remember during you know fees must
fall we were just so desperate for any kind of staff solidarity and now i’m in you know at a
london university and and staff members are on strike and staff members are just so desperate
for any kind of student solidarity and so it’s kind of it’s been really interesting for me to
be here and kind of witness the opposite of what i had experienced and kind of see
these groups that are you know both kind of subject to the same neoliberal you know systems
and how there’s so little connections or kind of politics to happen between the groups
and it kind of struck me in all three of your of your of your papers how how important that is
um we have one question i just want to know if we have enough time for it it’s a really good
closing question um you know two minutes okay okay uh then i’m i’m so so sorry to for a hand Joel
who i really thank but this question is it’s a perfect kind of closing question for Rata
on you know the kind of afterlives and the archives of of the are you reference list um
um if there’s if there’s time for it you’ll just have to take control of this because i’m a terrible
timekeeper oh you know i think that Rata did did speak to this kind of throughout and if you would
like to you know take the last two minutes to close then i’ll hand it back to you i was just
about to say we can continue this discussion on uh on twitter uh we have our uh femdialogue’s
uh twitter account which we can post here and we can continue some of these conversations but
also this is like one of an ongoing discussion um uh before i say more i just wanted to say
thank you Jess for an incredible Q&A uh and for all your insights and thoughts and um our speakers
for their incredible presentations and for taking time out and uh presenting their thoughts and
comments uh with us we are really really uh grateful uh for this and again like i said this
is a part of an ongoing conversation it’s the first panel of a series so we will definitely
continue this conversation we will also archive this um on our website uh which will be live
very soon uh we will collect all the links and resources that you have shared on the chat
put it together in email and email it to everyone who uh signed up along with uh the live website
uh just also a reminder that um we would love any of you who is interested to be involved and be a
part of this project we imagine this project to be a collective project to be rooted in our communities
uh to be rooted in feminist struggles uh and activism uh and practice uh so please please
reach out to us feel free to write to us uh you can also get in touch with us through our website
or our twitter accounts uh we will be conducting interviews uh in south africa from we will be
there physically in south africa from uh end of june to end of july uh and we will be speaking
to academics students researchers practitioners activists uh in the areas of uh in in this area
who’s working in this area and um we are also uh like the voices of people with lived experiences
are at the center of this research uh so please feel free to to reach out to us we would love to
hear from you we are also doing online interviews telephone interviews so if you would like to speak
to us uh through the digital medium uh also let us know and we can make arrangements according
to your needs um yeah uh jess do you want to say something or have i covered everything
i think you’ve covered everyone everything thanks so much everyone for being here it was
lovely to see you all uh yeah so that’s that’s it from us thank you again to jess uh hurata
furaha joel for your time and you’ve given us so so much to think about i have like pages and pages
of notes that i’m going to take back and reflect on and everyone who attended and posted such
such wonderful questions to our panel as well uh thank you and have a good rest of the day
solidarity thank you so much thank you just great bye could the speakers possibly stay on for like
two seconds if you don’t mind i think ah okay all right i think for us just left shall i i’ll
know for us there oh brilliant
they’re just waiting for everyone to leave and then
hello can you hear me hey can you hear me hello you can hear you hello hi bianca hi can you hear me
yeah oh for i can hear you okay great yeah i think you were asking us to stay on a little
bit for a second yeah hi sorry if that’s okay uh let me just quickly yeah perfect uh no i just
wanted to say thank you uh for your time and uh this was absolutely brilliant uh so just wanted
to say a personal thank you as well um and we are so sorry i forgot to switch on uh the recording
for uh hurata uh and uh you’re just wondering uh how we can include your presentation actually
i’ll stop the recording now