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Many were left sickened and seething over the latest Zapiro cartoon.

Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro, the famous satirist’s latest cartoon depicts President Jacob Zuma zipping up his trousers as one of the Gupta brothers gets ready to “rape” South Africa, depicted as a woman, with State Security Minister David Mahlobo, Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini and The New Age editor Moegsien Williams holding her down.

The cartoon is entitled: “She’s all Yours, Boss!” and was published for The Daily Maverick on Tuesday. See below:

RELATED ARTICLE: What on earth is wrong with Zapiro?

The outrage stems from the fact that it depicts violence on so many levels.

These are the questions we were left with upon viewing the cartoon:

1. Did Zapiro even bother to acknowledge or comprehend the effect that the illustration would trigger women who have experienced rape and sexual assault?

2. Zapiro says the current climate in the country over the Cabinet reshuffle warranted the ‘rape’ drawing. Is this an endorsement of rape culture?

3. Is this kind of representation not normalising rape?

4. Why are black men being depicted as hypersexualised rapists?

5. Is Zapiro eluding to the notion that black women’s bodies are always available to be raped?

Barbara Boswell says in her post about the cartoon: “These are pernicious stereotypes of black sexuality that Zapiro lazily reproduces…Again, Black women’s bodies do not stand for the South African nation, nor are we proxies for what men fight over. Making this equivalency objectifies black women.”

According to Zapiro however he does not take his recent depiction lightly.

He’s been singing the same song though ever since his first drawing of Zuma preparing to rape “Lady Justice” in 2008.

The 2008 cartoon drew a strong reaction, with many at the time calling into question the apparent trivialisation of rape and rape culture, as well as the “disrespectful” nature of the depiction of the president. 

If you’re still ignorant about the nature of rape:

LISTEN:

Did you know?

That 563 841 is the estimated number of sexual offenses that occurred (this stats are only for the year 2014/15 and the numbers have only skyrocketed.)

That only 62 649 cases have been reported.

Out of this 62 649 cases, only 8 174 of these sexual offenses have gone to court.

And out this 8 174 cases, only 5 484 have been convicted.

To blatantly agree that Zapiro was “right” because it’s just a metaphor of the state of our country…is wrong.

Here are more shocking facts about rape in SA and why you shouldn’t be “for” Zapiro’s offensive cartoon…

1. Every 4 seconds a rape is reported in South Africa

2. United Nation statistics show a rape occurs every 26 seconds in South Africa.

3. South Africa is the “rape capital of the world”.

Kathleen Day, director at the Rape Crisis Centre in Cape Town had this to say about Zapiro’s cartoon:

“Zapiro demonstrates what rape culture is…

It is unconscionable of Zapiro to trigger the trauma of thousands of rape survivors for the sake of a political point that everyone either gets anyway or will steadfastly remain unconvinced on.

In a country with rape statistics as high as South Africa’s, with more than 50 000 sexual offences reported to the police each year, a cartoon depicting the country as a woman after the act of being raped by its president is not just shocking: it is going to collectively trigger the memory of an intensely personal event and evoke overwhelmingly painful emotions for each one that remembers their own rape. And there are many. Far too many.

This is a strong example of how rape culture works in our society and how even the most self-aware among us are often quite blind to it.

The core of the problem of violence and crime in South Africa is a culture of violence, which needs to be seen and understood in the context of our extremely violent past. A culture of violence means: the majority of children and young people grow up in an environment in which violence is part of daily life.

Violence within families, between parents, and parents being violent towards their children, violence at school and on the street, on TV and other media, video games glorifying violence, violence as a means to deal with one´s feeling of inferiority or as a means to create a feeling of belonging, for instance to a criminal gang, violence of men against girls and women as part of masculine identity – and violence which has been considered by people supporting apartheid, and people fighting against it, as a legitimate means to fight for one´s political purposes over decades.

In a culture of violence, violence is seen as a normal and inevitable part of daily life. This can and needs to be changed, step by step.

The everyday violence of men against women, those that identify as women or that have women’s bodies often takes a sexual form.

By everyday violence I mean the violence that permeates the environment to the point that it can go unnoticed. Examples include male university students dancing on the grass outside a women’s residence singing songs about raping them and laughing, community groups blaming women for wearing revealing clothes rather than talking to men about taking responsibility for the way they handle themselves sexually, magazine adverts that show women enjoying violent sex with a group of men in order to promote a clothing brand, a police official who says that most women are lying about being raped, a prosecutor who says most victims were “asking for it” because they were drunk at the time or a judge who hands down less than the maximum sentence for the rape of a child because the rapist was “gentle”.

If you have the stomach for more examples there are many more to be found in online articles.

The ones I quote all come from stories told by people coming to the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust for information, support or counselling. One of our volunteer counsellors, Rebecca Helman writes vividly about being “submerged in violence” after seeing this cartoon.

The impact of rape on survivors is severe, many will lie awake at night and not be able to sleep or eat properly for days because of the powerful emotions they feel.

Feelings of fear, anxiety and vulnerability in particular provide the kind of undermining emotional preoccupation that often prevents women from working, studying or parenting effectively. Reliving rape is easily triggered.

It disturbs and disrupts everything rape survivors do and distresses the people close to them who feel helpless to do anything to mitigate these powerful feelings.

The fact that these same women often face the stigma of being socially disgraced when they speak out about being raped is another example of rape culture. Challenging rape culture in South Africa and asking ourselves what a culture of consent might look like and how we would build that culture instead would be a worthy subject for the media and for Zapiro.

He’s done it before in a cartoon that could not be more relevant now, in which a rape suspect, a policeman, a prosecutor, a judge and “the sygmatising public” are all represented in in a police line-up and the rape survivor being asked to identify the suspect is telling the investigating officer, “They all raped me!”

Remember this quote:

|The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis – Dante Alighieri|

Share your opinions with us!

Connect on www.rapecrisis.org.za, follow on Facebook and on Twitter as @RapeCrisis or call on 021 447 1467 or follow Rape Survivors’ Justice Campaign to lobby the South African government to roll out specialised sexual offences courts.

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