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Why are criminal acts in South Africa so violent? This is the question that Bill Dixon poses to criminologists in South Africa in this edition of SA Crime Quarterly. He also offers some insight into why it might be that South African academics and independent researchers have, on the whole, not focused on finding answers to this question – because instead they have tended to focus on how crime can be controlled by police. Dixon suggests that, for many cogent reasons, we have been distracted from trying to develop a better understanding of the context and motivation behind criminal violence because of a pre-occupation with policing.
That pre-occupation with policing as the answer to the problem of crime has long been the source of frustration to those who argue that placing policing in the centre of the response to violence is worse than futile. Indeed, South African criminologists (in the broadest sense of the term) appear to fall into two categories: those who take a public health approach to violence and whose work is informed by the World Health Organisation’s ecological model that provides a framework for understanding the risk and protective factors for violence; and those whose interest and focus is on the functioning of the criminal justice system.
The pre-occupation with, or focus on, policing as South Africa’s principal response to violent crime was exemplified on 20 September when the Minister of Police announced the 2010/11 crime statistics in Cape Town. The subtext of the event was that the police were solely responsible for the reductions in most categories of crime, and for fixing the problems that gave rise to the increases in other categories of crime. In response to questions about the persistently high rate of rape the Minister referred to the re-establishment of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit, whose members are trained to respond to sexual offences. Yet, as you will read in the article by Jewkes et al, no amount of fixing the police and criminal justice system (however necessary and important that may be) will change the fact that most rapes are motivated by sexual entitlement and the desire for ‘entertainment’. How has rape become viewed by a significant number of men in South Africa as a source of entertainment? How and why has sexual entitlement become so entrenched? These are questions that will remain unanswered for now.
The Minister’s message was clear – we can expect more ‘war’ against crime – and against criminals. In a telling Freudian slip when referring to ‘increasing trends in child abuse’ he said “we will declare war on children”. And as the police increasingly become the frontline response of the ANC and government to violent public protests against a range of municipal inefficiencies, corruption and political party infighting; and as the casualties mount; we will no doubt find ourselves trapped in a rhetoric of war. The front cover image for this edition of SACQ was kindly provided by Mikhael Subotsky from his collection titled ‘Die Vier Hoeke’.
Chandré Gould (Editor)
