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Violence is not about race or class

HERO TO ... Oscar Pistorius when he arrived at OR Tambo International Airport in January last year with the rest of the SA Paralympic team from the IPC Athletics World Championships in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is now facing a charge of murder. PHOTO: Sydney Seshibedi
HERO TO ... Oscar Pistorius when he arrived at OR Tambo International Airport in January last year with the rest of the SA Paralympic team from the IPC Athletics World Championships in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is now facing a charge of murder. PHOTO: Sydney Seshibedi

I HAVE a confession to make - I bought into the "Oscar mistook his girlfriend for a burglar" story. Hook, line and sinker.

In retrospect, my gullibility was embarrassing, and with introspection my bias was telling.

I believed him not just because he was a sports hero from our brother school, Pretoria Boys High, but because he is a middle-class white man.

In 2004, former Springbok rugby player Rudi Visagie was charged with the murder of his 19-year-old daughter after he mistook her for a car thief and shot her in the family's driveway.

When Visagie heard her Volkswagen Golf being driven away at 5am on a Sunday, assuming her daughter to be asleep, he took his 7.65mm pistol, and fired a shot through the bedroom window.

When he went to his driveway, he found her dead behind the wheel.

My mind recalled this tragic shooting as a comparison rather than the common occurrence of women dying at the hands of their partners.

So, I was caught up in the chorus of "what a sad story about Oscar Pistorius's girlfriend", whose tweets suggested that she had a surprise planned for her lover.

It seemed feasible that she would have sneaked into his house in the wee hours of the morning to surprise him for Valentine's Day.

I am guilty of making assumptions on innocence based on who the person is, rather than the facts. A man mistaking his girlfriend for a burglar in the early hours of the morning does sound rather far-fetched.

When I was in my second year of university, a male friend was accused of rape. I didn't know what to believe, so I believed nothing. We had been at a party at the men's residence where he and the young lady disappeared.

The next morning, he was accused of rape, she had gone to the doctor and if my memory serves me correctly, he was arrested.

The few days that followed were surreal, because of a haunting question he had asked: "You know me, do you think I am capable of rape?"

In the last few weeks, South Africa has been at a loss to explain the violent expression of power by men in this country.

In trying to understand the conditions that have led to this crisis, many have been obsessed with trying to find a formula for determining what kind of a person gets raped, what kind of person rapes and what kind of circumstances lead to women being raped.

We make assumptions, one being that poor communities - because unemployment and alcoholism are rife - breed conditions for gender-based violence.

We look at everything except the act of violence itself against women.

Pistorius's actions contradict our perceptions and highlight the non-class and nonracial nature of violence against women.

It should worry all of us that it was only when bits and pieces of information about Pistorius started to come outon Valentine's Day, when doubt was cast on innocence.

In our society, the burden of proof is placed on victims and survivors of violence to prove that the perpetrator is capable of the violent act, and not on the criminal justice system to investigate the alleged crime.

We need to be honest about some of the ambiguities that are bothering us and accept how close we all are to the crisis.

How do families and loved ones support an accused person without being vilified for not believing the accuser? How do we navigate between crying out against gender-based violence and treating all accused as innocent until proven guilty? We all need to deal with gender-based violence in our communities without making it a class or race issue.

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