By Tholakele Thabane
On 20 September 2024, the Women Affected by Mining United in Action (WAMUA) launched a groundbreaking report that revealed disturbing patterns about the scourge of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and obstetric violence.
The report titled, Women’s Struggles and Resilience to Violence in Mining Affected Communities; Beneath the Surface, exposes the systemic injustices women in mining communities endure.
The forerunner to the report was a three-day workshop that focused mainly on sharing experiences, stories, knowledge and wisdom from women. A few exercises were explored and two stood out; the Identity Flower where our comrades explored their identities and collective awareness of the multiple violences and Body Mapping was another exercise, where violences that are considered normal by society were identified.
Building up from exploring identities, the three sessions explored and helped identify how fears, tension, stress and violence are affecting our lives and how it relates to systems of oppression and how we can strategise to deal with these challenges.
Keamogetswe Seipato, a feminist activist, senior researcher and lead author of the report, said a huge amount of work went into the report. She further mentioned that the report gives a clear picture of what it means to be a woman living in a mining affected community.
“And some of us, because we do not have access to formal employment, need to find new ways to put food on the table. [These new ways include] selling food, working in taverns and [thereby] we further experience violence,” Seipato added.
The alarming reality
The report encompassed experiences of women activists from 14 communities in Limpopo, Gauteng, North West and Northern Cape provinces. The surveys that formed part of the report were conducted between 2022 and 2023.
The women were surveyed about the ways GBV and obstetric violence (inflicted by healthcare professionals to pregnant and birthing women in healthcare facilities) impact them and the possible links between the two forms of violence and mineral resource extraction. The first survey featured 860 respondents to discuss about domestic violence, sexual harassment and sex assault. The second survey with 959 respondents focused on obstetric violence, evaluating healthcare facilities, services and personnel conduct.
What emerged out of the report is that women face significant barriers to access to health and dignity, there are limited opportunities and gender disparities when it comes to employment and education, there is widespread of GBV and inadequate support when referring to violence and protection.
The numbers of women who experience physical or sexual violence in mining-affected communities is staggering. 52% of the respondents didn’t report GBV to police which could be because of lack of information, fear of losing places of shelter, lovers and providers.
And when it comes to obstetric violence, 49% said that their genitals were touched without their consent by a medical and health practitioner during labour, 43% faced physical force at the hands of medical staff, with the highest number of these incidents taking place in Kuruman, Northern Cape, 33% faced verbal abuse and again, Kuruman had the highest number of these incidents while 24% said that medical students watched them give birth without their consent, thereby violating their privacy.
The devastating reality is that government is not adept at protecting women against obstetric violence. In this country a woman has to be violated grossly enough before their abuse could be equated to medical malpractice, said Dr Sheena Swemmer, Head of Gender Justice programme at Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies.
A complex web
But beyond the statistics lies a complex web of social, economic and cultural factors that perpetuate this violence. Monica Ngcobo MACUA Branch Coordinator in Kuruman, mentioned that women face numerous forms of oppression that exacerbate the violence inflicted mostly by men. And sometimes women hide their struggles, breeding fertile grounds for GBV.
The struggle against gender-based and obstetric violence in South Africa’s mining communities is a fight against deeply entrenched historical and systemic issues. WAMUA’s activism and research has laid the groundwork for this fight.
Tackling GBV in mining communities as a whole necessitates not only addressing the direct violence experienced by women in and around mines, but also confronting the broader systemic issues of economic exclusion, environmental degradation and power imbalances.
Consequently, WAMUA makes an urgent call for actors in civil society to truly collaborate in addressing the intertwined challenges of gender-based violence, health and dignity in these communities.
The GBV report is more than a documentation of atrocities; it’s a rallying cry for change. We must confront the harsh realities faced by women in mining-affected communities and work together to create safer, more just environments.
