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India and South Africa are two rapidly transforming economies grappling with social and political transitions – the ongoing consolidation and contestation of Hindu nationalist populism in India and the project of post-apartheid reconstruction and transformation in South Africa. Within these contexts, violence against women remains high, despite a raft of progressive legislation aimed at tackling such violence. In this article, we offer a broad overview emerging from a joint research project involving researchers from both countries and drawing on fieldwork in two class-differentiated sites: Gurgaon (in Delhi NCR, India) and Alexandra/Sandton (in Johannesburg, South Africa). The article draws specifically on women’s narratives of violence and the discursive ambivalences, tropes, and aspirations of Indian and South African women as they negotiate everyday violence. We emphasize the importance of contextual, intersectional and granular approaches to understanding gendered violence, and of situating the social production of violence in specific spatial relations where such violence is both normalized and contested.

Keywords

Contextual global sociology gendered violence India normalization of violence South Africa

Background

An oft-cited statistic suggests that gender-based violence affects one in three women across the globe; this important but broad-brush figure, suggesting an ‘epidemic’ scale of violence, nevertheless cannot capture variation in forms and categories of violence, added to which is the difficulty that even this figure may be a conservative estimate because of the inherent difficulties of under-reporting and unreliable official data (Dlamini, 2021; Fitz-Gibbon and Harris, 2023). There are a large number of studies that use cross-national and local survey data showing that violence against women is related to a range of structural, familial, interpersonal, and psychological variables (Panda and Agarwal, 2005; Rao, 1997; Stockman et al., 2013; Venis and Horton, 2002; Watts and Zimmerman, 2002; World Health Organization, 2002, 2005). Quantification is both necessary and yet challenging, because institutional neglect and apathy widely discourage both the reporting and prosecution of violence. In addition, as we discuss in this article, violence itself is an unstable category and resistant to definition and naming, such that it remains folded into everyday lives as part of its fabric, often negotiated and managed, rather than rendered an object of complaint or action. As Sally Engle Merry (2009) has argued, indicators which form the basis of quantification, are designed for ease of counting and to create commensurate categories across national lines. Yet, in the process of translation what is lost is the social and cultural organization within which this violence takes place. The experiential dimension of violence, the cultural meanings of gender, marriage, and sexuality, the social context of the violence, marriage and kinship, and the general level of tolerance and mechanisms for deflecting violence, including normalization, resist quantification and yet remain vital to understanding gendered violence.

This article draws out some key findings from our project on gendered violence in India and South Africa. In line with the United Nation’s definition of gendered violence which includes not only overt, singular physical acts or sexual violation but also the disciplining of women’s conduct and behaviour, coercive control, emotional intimidation and manipulation, economic abuse, and restrictions (Mphaphuli and Smuts, 2021; World Bank, 2019) our fieldwork attempted to grasp the experiences and understandings of violence in a variety of settings. Based on fieldwork conducted in phases between 2020 and 2024 across neighbourhoods in Gurgaon (Delhi NCR) and Johannesburg (described in more detail further below), which focused on women’s own narratives of and about violence, we tease out some themes that reflect commonalities and differences between the two sites. We focus, in particular, on the notion of ‘normalization’ – because it alludes to violence being accommodated in relationships, enabling its embeddedness in the social fabric of urban life, and making survivors co-responsible for working with and around patriarchal norms (McCarry and Lombard, 2016). Gqola (2007: 117) refers to normalization in terms of ‘normal heterosexual play’ that ‘contains codes that inscribe feminine passivity and masculine aggression as mundane aspects of being a woman and man respectively’. Penttinen (2024) refers to the ‘harm of normalized violence’, arguing for more efforts to be made to raise awareness about ‘private violence’. Indeed, a critical element of the normalization of violence is how much violence is privatized, that is, how much occurs in the private sphere and therefore remains outside public scrutiny. While the media and political leaders focus on public violence, the everyday, normalized, and banal forms of gendered subordination and control remain outside the purview of critical analysis, and yet arguably these unexamined patterns of gender relations are the very foundations of the more public forms of violence.

Our project at its inception was committed to further developing what researchers have called a ‘second wave’ of violence research that is theoretically oriented, historically sensitive, contextual, and aimed at granular analyses of violence. While large survey data and epidemiological approaches offer much insight into trends and patterns of violence, our approach entailed a mixed-method approach using ethnography, life history interviews (face-to-face and online during the pandemic), and archival research to build an intimate neighbourhood-based approach. As researchers, we were keen to understand the intersections of gender, class, caste, race, familial and kinship-based contextual realities, and differences in terms of everyday risks and vulnerabilities) and the accompanying discourses and rationalizations that created the conditions for violence and insecurity (Aulenbacher and Riegraf, 2016).

We took the view that any effort to build an understanding of the complex dynamics of gendered violence would require an appreciation of how urban transformations, in historically produced contexts such as post-apartheid, are manifested in everyday life, and why in these daily rhythms of life, violence against women becomes so prevalent. Specifically, we suggest that shifts in security, ownership, rights, dispossession, and value are imbricated in episodes, enactments, and perceptions of gendered violence in the two cities, Delhi and Johannesburg. Abraham (2018: 2) has argued for ‘a contextual global sociology, which recognizes that issues are often global but require understanding within specific contexts’; indeed, gendered violence is globally pervasive, but produced in historically specific conditions which require research methodologies that are attuned to that reality. Furthermore, comparing two global South locations adds to a rich literature of African and Indian feminist writings to enhance scholarship on violence (Abraham and Vasil, 2024).

Contextual approaches to gendered violence are already well established in feminist intersectional work;¹ in our project, we further developed this area of work through a greater emphasis on the polyvalence of violence, that is, drawing attention to how various actors define ‘violence’, and the meanings and causes they attach to it, such that violence is always both an act and a symbolic referent for underlying class, caste, racial, and political tensions and inequalities. We also add, importantly, that while in this article we focus on the hetero-patriarchal foundations of violence, and its normalization, we acknowledge that violence is a critical issue among same-sex intimate partners as well. There is evidence, especially in South Africa, that same-sex partners, often marginalized and stigmatized, tend to underreport, hide, and consequently ‘accommodate’ violence in domestic settings (De Wet-Billings and Billings, 2024).

Researching violence: Sites and methods

Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) and Johannesburg are both referred to in the popular press as ‘rape capitals’ of the world, given the high levels of violence against women; similarly, state structures in both countries are referred to as ineffective or complicit in violence and mistreatment of women.² Such impressionistic typecasting of cities in the Global South reflects colonial and post-colonial discourses about rape and the inherent classed and racialized stereotypes of certain men as inherently lascivious and violent. Interrogating such discourses was in part the rationale for this project (see also Roychowdhury, 2013). Indeed, the popular, mediatized designation of Delhi and Johannesburg as ‘rape capitals’ reproduces the typecasting of spaces as inherently violent with attendant stereotypes of marginalized males as being more prone to committing violence. By selecting these two cities, and looking at gendered violence across social inequalities of class in intersection with race and caste – we sought to challenge such depictions and question such circulating discourses which are deployed by not only the media but, as we argue, the middle classes too. In doing so, we sought a balance between interrogating the persistence of violence, while simultaneously uncovering the silences, deflections, and neglect of gendered violence across intersecting social hierarchies. More recent media attention has perpetuated such stereotypes – for example, Delhi gained international notoriety after the brutal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus in 2012 which resulted in her death. International and local media representations of Nirbhaya’s gang rape were replete with discussions about ‘frustrated males’, and the clash of ‘old and new’, ‘modernity and tradition’ (Roychowdhury, 2013; Shandilya, 2015). In turn, these discourses have entered the imagination, and as we discuss subsequently in the article, this has in turn led to the reinforcement of a paternalistic ethos that obscures the reasons for such violence.

In Johannesburg, South Africa, several brutal murders, such as that of 22-year-old, Karabo Mokoena, catalysed widespread protests with calls made for a state of emergency on gender-based violence (GBV) to be declared, as the hashtag #MenAreTrash trended on Twitter (Boonzaier, 2023; Spies, 2020). There have been numerous protest marches in Johannesburg that have prompted the government to pledge firm action against perpetrators of violence.

Both countries have strong civil society movements that have placed pressure on the respective states and their agencies to act to curb violence. Both countries report much talk about violence and high levels of fear of being victimized – fuelled in part by media-led debates and discussions (McIlwaine, 2013). There has been increased focus on masculinities and the ways in which societal structures and institutions nurture ideas about male toughness, superiority, and aggressive ways of resolving public and private matters. Being in control, as a ‘real man’, leads to socially sanctioned ways of dominating women – women may have their movements controlled, freedoms curbed, and economic power diminished. Adherence to rigid gender roles in both these sites where men wield substantially more power creates the conditions for violence against women. There is, however, a plurality of masculinities in play – being made and remade – they are ‘works in progress’ (Srivastava, 2012: 15) leading to views that they can be engaged with and transformed (Ratele, 2015). While we acknowledge the importance of a focus on masculinities, in this article, we draw on data from women’s own narratives of violence, seeking to understand better the similarities and differences between how women experience everyday threats and violence in the two cities.

Gurgaon is a city within Delhi NCR, and a hub of international investment with spectacular malls and symbols of globalized consumption. Wealthy neighbourhoods and apartment complexes are hidden behind privatized security. Woven through these neighbourhoods are village-like settlements (peri-urban) with caste-class-religious configurations, which service the wealthy households. Gurgaon is formally part of Haryana state which is a socially conservative region with distinct patriarchal traditions; the daily and seasonal migration of young men from neighbouring villages into Gurgaon also allowed us to observe the outcome of the clash between these different cultural and social groups with attendant perceptions about women that inevitably arise. Furthermore, Gurgaon’s reputation as a violent city is premised on the real estate boom and surge of big money that accompanied this boom during the 1990s, as well as the influx of corporate money. Certain caste groups such as the Jats and Gujjars sold agrarian land to capitalize on the real estate boom; as beneficiaries of the immense profit in land sales, as well as witnesses to the urban transformation of the region, these dominant castes have had to come to terms with the moral and cultural juxtaposition of urban capitalist freedoms, often colliding with their own gendered norms and expectations (Cowan, 2018). The newer elite residents in turn view them as patriarchal and prone to violence against women; the backdrop to these perceptions being the low sex ratio in Haryana. These notions and stereotypes of ‘others’ who were deemed more violent or inviting immorality, were replete in the interviews conducted by the India team, which focused on areas ranging from the high-rise and securitised gated communities, to peri-urban villages and various tenement buildings. This cross-section of spatialized caste–class relations allowed us to build an intimate picture of how violence is experienced and constructed relationally within a rapidly transforming urban context.

Alexandra and Sandton are interlinked areas within the City of Johannesburg in the province of Gauteng. Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa and Gauteng is the wealthiest province. Alexandra, also known as Alex, is a township in the Gauteng province of South Africa that was proclaimed a ‘Native Township’ in 1912 a year before the Natives Land Act was passed preventing Black people from owning land. This turned Alex into a place of refuge, and temporary residence, and a significant site of anti-apartheid struggle. Despite various attempts to forcibly relocate large sections of the population, work-seekers kept arriving to rent spaces because of the close proximity of the area to wealthy Sandton and other places of employment (Wilson, 2002). Despite the township’s rich history of anti-apartheid mobilization, it has come to symbolise the extremes of post-apartheid deprivation in South Africa (Langa, 2020). Nelson Mandela described Alexandra Township in the 1940s as unsafe, and the challenge of walking home at night as ‘perilous’ (Wilson, 2002). Eighty years later, in post-apartheid South Africa, Alex remains a crowded place, with high levels of crime and violence (Mujinga, 2024; Zinyemba and Hlongwana, 2022). However, the area also exhibits heterogeneity, with both very poor and more well-off sections. Sandton, approximately 3–5 km away from Alex, is known as ‘the richest square mile’ of Africa and houses the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the headquarters of wealthy companies. It is in many ways comparable to the wealthy gated communities and multinational companies in Gurgaon. The South Africa team conducted interviews in both vicinities – in the crowded township of Alex and the luxurious apartments of Sandton.

The conceptualization, proposal writing, and planning for this qualitative research initiative took place in 2020, weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns were declared in both India and South Africa. Two teams of researchers, one from India and the other from South Africa, met to discuss potential field sites. After much deliberation, debate, and the revisiting of the project’s aims to foreground class differentials, Gurgaon (in India) and Alex/Sandton (in South Africa) were selected as the most useful and potentially comparable. Snowball sampling (through referrals and contacts) and purposive sampling (through approaching organizations) were decided upon in both sites. The project aims had to be readjusted through the COVID-19 lockdowns which affected the two cities Delhi and Johannesburg acutely. We were able to move forward with face to face interviews by 2022. Our team included several postdoctoral scholars from the United Kingdom, India and South Africa, with the latter teams consisting of several researchers deeply familiar with, or residents of the neighbourhoods that were chosen for research. In some cases, local non-governmental organization (NGO) contacts and activists played a key role in enabling access to women in all neighbourhoods. The postdoctoral researchers were based for more than a year in each of the locations – Gurgaon and Johannesburg. The interviewees were women aged between 20 and 35, selected through snowballing methods across different neighbourhoods as described in both locations.

Our fieldwork began in the context of renewed mobilization against violence in both countries, so we paid particular attention to women’s views about what was changing and what remained the same. Building textured data necessitated time-consuming and painstaking research primarily during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) when lockdowns meant that not many women had easy opportunities to report violence within homes.

Fieldwork revelations: Silence and speaking out

As recounted by Garima Jaju, postdoctoral researcher on the team, the India-based researchers in fact encountered a pervasive silence when they began asking direct questions about the experiences of gendered violence. This silence directed us to a methodological and analytical conundrum, namely, what happens when researching GBV by asking questions about GBV. It became increasingly apparent that the term ‘violence’ had become a pre-determined and loaded category, layered with class-based respectability and shame, as well as dominant public discourses of gender-based rights and equality, that come with its close association with ideas of modernity and urban civility. Among the upper and upwardly mobile classes, direct questioning about the personal experience of gendered violence within their own home led to deflection or disavowal, as it conflicted with their image of societal respectability and narratives of modernity (see also Bhandari, 2020). However, when the field researchers refrained from asking direct questions about violence, the ensuing conversations brought out the web of affective and structural interdependencies and bargaining, within which violence (ever-present) comes to be managed, confronted, made invisible, or endured. The methodological dilemmas of encountering silence, which were present more glaringly in India than in South Africa, were further layered with the complexities of class, racial and caste inequalities in each site. While middle-class women located the violence outside the gated communities as being present in ‘those’ communities, women in the working-class communities were more voluble and forthcoming about it. The phenomenon of talking about violence ‘elsewhere’, often in deprived neighbourhoods, was enhanced by the actual spatial juxtaposition of highly unequal neighbourhoods in both Delhi and Johannesburg. Reference to the upper class or lower orders of neighbouring areas and streets was a crucial aspect of how violence was talked about, rationalized, and perpetrated.

Context, intersectionality, and gendered violence

An intersectional approach is invaluable in eliciting the nuances of how violence manifests in different parts of society, and how discursive ‘myths’ enable the production of violence as a ‘thing’ that is spoken or not spoken about, acted upon and challenged, or normalized. Among others, Skeggs (1997) has offered a crucial analytical framework for thinking about class and gender as interlinked formations. Skeggs (1997) argued against the evacuation of class from Western feminist theory, stating that for women (in her analysis, working-class women) class is, in fact, central to their trajectories. She paid great attention to how class differences and relations, and attendant stigmatization and moral judgements played a key role in women’s identifications and subjectivities. Our research supports this important analytical insight, indicating furthermore, the intersections of race and caste in the two contexts render ‘women’ a contested and differentiated subject of gendered violence (see also Nguse, 2023). In South African feminist scholarship, constructs of gender are commonly viewed in terms of race and class, and violence is accordingly gendered in racialized and classed ways. The invisibility and privileged status of whiteness and middle class in violence discourses, for instance, can operate to frame domestic violence in white middle-class households as an individualized pathology, in contrast to domestic violence perpetrated in stigmatized or marginalized black communities which is more often framed as the outcome of problematic ‘culture’. Similarly, in the India materials, middle-class, upper caste men and women frame the problem of gendered violence as external to their realities, situating it within the chaos and dangers of everyday working-class lives.

In the section that follows, we highlight some of the narratives of women (who represent differences in terms of class, caste, race, age, locality, and nationality) from both fieldwork sites.

Ethnographic notes from Gurgaon and Alex/Sandton

Fieldwork in Gurgaon

An upper-class woman, serving on the board of the Residents Welfare Association (RWA) of her posh gated condo, hears of betrayals, infidelities, loneliness, and broken marriages in her weekday lunches with her lady friends, but never of violence. Violence as a ‘problem’ is seen to exist outside the gates of their residential enclaves, a problem ‘solved’ much as in South Africa, by deploying security guards, trusted drivers, CCTV cameras, screening domestic staff, and so on. A middle-class woman, working as a software engineer, admits how few families she knows in her gated colony. The architectural design of their housing complexes, as also the social design of their lives, busy with young children and work is such that while one meets other residents socially, one can never really hear or see what is really happening inside another’s home. She more readily describes the kind of savagery and ruthlessness common to the slums and villages, ‘those kinds of spaces’. Preeti, an administrator at a Gurgaon firm and another inhabitant of the high rises uses an apt metaphor: ‘. . . we are running, running, running all the time’. She has heard of women being abused but ‘people are 80%-90% educated . . . working all the time . . . and nobody can guess what is going on next door’.

In the slums, tenement blocks, and urban villages, on the other hand, there is more open acknowledgement of violence in the overcrowded social settings where the private words and actions of every home spill out into the narrow corridors and travel through the thin walls and curtains serving as doors.³ Drunk, cheating, lying, and abusive husbands are singled out and deplored as not just harmful but also ‘useless’. Among the Haryanvi ‘locals’ in the villages, haunted by the spectres of honour killings and sex-selective abortions, it is the ‘characterless’ and ‘sexually loose’ homes of migrant workers where violence happens. They themselves claim to have ‘developed’ with the ‘modernity’ that has accompanied the real estate boom in the area, and their own economic mobility. However, it is emphasized that they have also been careful to not ‘over develop’ and ‘over modernise’, illustrated by the fact that their women continue to stay ‘within limits’, possessing a sense of modesty, respect and fear of elders, unlike the ‘hi-fi’ type who attracts attention on the streets.

Fieldwork in Gurgaon revealed the great extent to which middle-class women have had to cede control of their mobility to men and their families. Young women talked about how they were under continual surveillance, often from mothers who insisted upon the presence of a male guardian to accompany them when out late at night.

As one middle-class 23-year-old woman in Gurgaon put it,

I am saying statistically that this idea of ‘unsafety is in public spaces’ is so false, and it’s just blown up to cover up the fact that most of violence against women is intimate-partner or domestic or within known private spaces. Just by saying that the rapist stalker is the image of the stranger man . . . the idea that the more marginalized we can get in the class-caste space, the more danger there is, (that idea) is fake . . . I actually don’t think I am objectively in danger. The only people I am in danger from is my parents, and their epic judgements that are based on absolutely nothing.

Young women evade such monitoring through elaborate lies and plans involving the collaboration of friends. With the lines of spatial safety firmly drawn for women in this way, any transgression of such limits elicits heated reactions on the part of protective families and male guardians. Even if well-meaning on the part of guardians, this paternalism replaces a meaningful discussion of male privilege and gendered violence, instead curtailing women’s freedoms that create resentment and everyday forms of resistance to paternalism, as the quote above shows. Women are forced into a position of dependence on male relatives and partners, despite achieving modern and neoliberal forms of autonomy through education and careers and developing subjectivities that are more aligned with ideas of feminist autonomy, however narrowly conceived. When confronted with violence in their own relationships, women feared revealing this to their own families for fear of further curtailment of their mobility; instead, they relied on networks of friends for help and support. Secretive sexual relationships often meant acquiescing to coercive and unprotected sex, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and pregnancy scares which would be carefully concealed from their families.

The urban imaginaries that create the perceived need for the social control of women are, we suggest, themselves part of the phenomenon of gendered violence. They encourage coercive and emotional control of women, directing and regulating their conduct while reproducing the prejudices and moral judgements that enable silence and voice on violence. In a sharply unequal urban context, these also serve to exacerbate the othering of the lower caste poor through notions of the underclass man as the violent and brute attacker (Annavarapu and Levenson, 2021; Das, 1996). For us, reflecting on the methodological problems posed by talking directly about violence in Gurgaon, it is shame and respectability that appeared more salient in the discussions about violence. Indeed, when our interlocuters assigned blame externally, the wider issue became that of the failures of social control, specifically the more traditional modes of control. Modernity and development in Gurgaon, and the influx of money were seen as the primary culprits; there was a sense that before the influx of ‘hi fi’ life traditional ways of life in Haryana had limited such violence. Notwithstanding the very high levels of female infanticide and dowry-related violence in Haryana, there is a grain of truth in this commonly felt sentiment. The urban transformation of Gurgaon, corporatization, and rapid inflation in land values have created a new context for forms of gendered violence and perceptions about them that reflect the forms of class inequality that have arisen. The new contextual amalgam of class, caste, and gender is key to grasping how gendered violence is produced and reproduced in Gurgaon.

Fieldwork in Alex/Sandton

In South Africa, we found talk of safety and fear to be prevalent almost everywhere across the two sites of Alex and Sandton, among the wealthy and the financially disadvantaged. This pervasive sense of fear although similar to that expressed in Gurgaon, was, however, different in some crucial ways. In sharp contrast to India,⁴ the level of mobilization and discourse against GBV was much more public and freely articulated. Many South African surveys aiming to capture public sentiments consistently show strong anti-GBV views across the population (Mampane, 2023; Mpako and Ndoma, 2023). Many women post #MeToo and in alignment with global trends are willing to call out violence and name it. One middle-class Coloured participant from Sandton remarked about the hard-hitting naming and shaming of perpetrators via social media, suggesting that it was triggered by the death of Uyinene Mrwetyana (a 19-year-old South African student raped and killed in 2019). She maintained,

I think after Nene’s death, people became braver to talk about their own experiences and what happened to them. Even at the beginning of this year, I believe in March, there was a whole thing on Twitter about girls saying – ‘I was at this age . . .’ It was mostly that a girl would just tweet that ‘It happened when I was 12 or I was 15’. After that, it also became more obvious to me that lots of women that I know in Sandton as well [were abused].

While it is clear that gender issues are being taken up more readily by younger women who are not prepared to accept violations and infringements of their rights, it is also important to acknowledge that women’s mobilizations have a long history dating back the mass democratic (anti-apartheid) movement. These powerful mobilizations made their presence felt in the new South African constitution, which enshrined a globally exceptional set of rights and empowered the state infrastructure to deliver the constitutional mandates. Yet, there is a real contradiction – despite this internationally renowned constitution, the reality on the ground for women is very different, as various feminists have pointed out. Indeed, Gqola (2007) calls the constitution of the South African state ‘aspirational’ when it comes to matters of gendered violence given the disconnect between the policy and legislative sphere of anti-violence measures and the extremely high levels of reported violence against women. She suggests that in post-apartheid South Africa, ‘empowerment’ is understood through markers such as wealth, jobs and increased representation as ‘gender progress’ rather than aiming at transforming structures. Thus, despite the clear willingness to speak directly about violence, there are also mechanisms that hide the ways in which violence becomes banalized.

Despite the constitutional guarantees, historical legacies of apartheid have meant a deep suspicion of police and the police’s own reluctance to ‘interfere’ in ‘domestic affairs’. As Alexander (2000: 791) argued 25 years ago, ‘[t]here is a fundamental, structural relationship between apartheid’s legacy of violence and the sexual abuse women face . . .’. Furthermore, she stated, that the ‘current government struggles to transform the police from a political tool of the apartheid state into a nonpolitical security force . . .’ (Alexander, 2000). Even though more middle-class Black and White women in Sandton were willing to speak out about violence compared to their counterparts in Gurgaon, they found very little credibility when they did so. When interacting with police and security guards who are often working class, the symbolic and material dimensions of these cross-class and cross-race interactions posed significant and complex challenges for wealthy women trying to get state support in some form. Young women from Sandton argued that they do not want to be thought of as spoilt and uppity women. One Black participant said, ‘When I reach out for support or any kind of help from the police or security guards, I can tell that they do not believe me, they think of me as a “Sandton girl” who is just spoilt’. A 35-year-old, middle-class White participant encountered a similar experience. In attempting to report being physically beaten (by her partner) at the local police station, she said a police officer did not take her seriously. She stated,

He made some funny comments about these young rich ladies coming here to report ‘un-existing cases’. Don’t you have money to take this case further, he asked while laughing (I didn’t understand what he was referring to). When I narrated my story, he kept on shaking his head and so I stood up and left (I was frustrated). When I was walking out he said, ‘don’t waste your time with stupid men – come to me and I will take care of you’. Everyone was laughing while I was rushing out.

Hence, in a complex and paradoxical sense, middle-class and wealthy women in South Africa often receive less support and fewer benefits from the state because they are not deemed as requiring protection. Irene Khumalo, Director of a leading anti-GBV NGO, ADAPT, agreed that middle-class spaces of Johannesburg are underserved and under-explored when it comes to questions of gendered violence and supporting victims who have experienced it. She explained,

We have worked really hard to sensitise the police in Alex, it has taken us years of work to do that. But in Sandton they have nothing. I don’t think the police have been trained there or have any kind of sensitivity to be able to deal with women.

As in India, gendered respectability also matters – wealthy and middle-class women expressed vulnerability to social pressures and demands of keeping up appearances in order to belong within these spaces. As Lebo, a Black woman in her 50s explained,

It took me a long time to think of myself as a victim, I kept thinking, this can’t be happening, I’m not a victim, I’m not one of those battered women that I see on TV or on the news.

Likewise, another Black woman explained that she could not bring herself to call herself a victim of any sort ‘I have fought so hard, for so long, to get to where I am, to then think of myself as a victim was very difficult’.

As middle-class women whose long-term aspirations are to live prosperous lives, they might protect the liberty of their abuser while hindering their ability to free themselves from abuse. This said several participants talked about walking away from their abusive partners, particularly when their sense of independence and work statuses strengthened. As one participant (White, middle-aged) stated,

A lot of women are realising that they don’t need a partner to complete them or make them whole or make them happy. That they can be in charge of their own destiny and they have equal aspirations from a career point of view, from a lifestyle point of view. And so this can cause issues in a relationship especially where a woman is earning the higher salary or is the breadwinner.

Encounters with violence, or the stress associated with the fear of being violated, prompts wealthier women to reach out to private therapists and practitioners. Thus, rather than go to police stations for protection orders as would be the case with working-class women, the middle-class women of Sandton would report the violence to a growing network of therapists, counsellors, life coaches, and lawyers who would serve to mediate and advise them on how to address, contend with, or resolve their difficult circumstances.

As mentioned before, the proximity of Alex and Sandton became increasingly relevant as it became evident that the emergent class and gender identities for young women in Alex are formed through what we call the ‘Sandton window’. There are coexisting and conflicting desires to be an ‘It girl’– sexually free, unrestrained, fashionable, and desired by men while envied by other women who cannot afford her lifestyle and to conform to heteronormative stereotypes of being cared for by a man and therefore a marriageable girl. In capitalist post-apartheid South Africa there is a desire for instant success and to embody images of a soft life. However, there is a cost to some young women from Alex seeking to escape the township and build a future in Sandton through using intimate relationships, that is, the desire to escape poverty through transactional sexual relationships which often trap women in violent and abusive relationships, often with older men. As Pam, a young Black therapist, maintained,

It’s a transactional relationship in a sense. And sometimes in therapy they try and find meaning in that relationship. You know, they try and talk about ‘you know, maybe I do love him. Maybe I do have affection for him. Maybe there is something going on’. But generally, the conclusion tends to be that this is merely a relationship of transaction. As soon as she graduates, she will not see him again. And most of the time he is married. This is just merely something that is convenient for him.

These relationships hold high risks for women who must find ways to manage them and contain and work around the constant possibilities of violence. In India, in contrast, we did not find such direct examples of transactional sexual relationships in our fieldwork materials. We found that families exercise much greater control over partner choices, with marriage upheld as the end goal of such relationships. Although it is outside the scope of this article to further develop this point, it is important to note that the centrality of the heteronormative institution of marriage as a powerful cultural fixture of patriarchy is strikingly different from the South African case and an important driver of gendered violence in India.

Conclusion

In this article, we have highlighted some of the ways in which violence against women is produced in a context of ongoing subordination despite waves of feminist resistance and circulation of feminist discourses, as well as progressive anti-violence legislation. The comparisons of two countries and cities, and nested comparisons within these cities, highlight for us how gender becomes the site and sign of the churning of class, race and caste positions and mobilities such that violence is an ever-present aspect of women’s lives – not only in terms of the acts of violence which remain undercounted but the ever-present threat that women have to negotiate even as they evolve a presentation of feminist self that is free and unrestrained, mobile and aspirational. Central in this view, is our reference to the normalization of violence and the persistence of dynamics that drive the silencing, trivializing, and privatizing of gendered violence. In general, the findings from our project suggest that rather than debating the metrics of a phenomenon that is notoriously difficult to quantify, it is more productive to understand what these forms of violence tell us about the social order, and moreover, why they seem to defy and even accompany the proliferation of legal and carceral means to address violence. Our approach contrasts with a popular approach prevalent in policy circles, which put forward toolkits to be implemented across different contexts to prevent violence against women. While there are some important insights underpinning these approaches, such as addressing poverty and insecurity, education and rights for women, our approach suggests that historical and contextually determined social relations rather than individuals lie at the heart of successful transformation programmes. In this sense, we align ourselves with the call for a contextual global sociology that recognizes growing and critical contributions from the global south (Abraham, 2018: 2). Our methodological approach also suggests that social relations are spatially situated, such that gendered violence must be addressed through the particular forms of discourse and language, as well as cultural understandings prevalent in these contexts, that work from the bottom up. Our data has elicited the meanings women associate not only with violence, but also with class, kinship, caste, race, and mobility within spaces. Using these understandings to develop sensitive and nuanced interventions can enhance existing programmes that rely on incentives, policies, and the law.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project that the article refers to was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Manali Desai was the principal investigator and Kammila Naidoo was one of the Co-Principal Investigators.

ORCID iD

Kammila Naidoo

Notes

Author biographies

Manali Desai is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her work encompasses the areas of ethnic and gendered violence, state formation, crisis, and post-colonial transformation. She was PI of the ESRC project, Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa. She has published State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860-1990 (2007) and co-edited books including States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (2009) and Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (2015).

Kammila Naidoo is a Professor of Sociology based at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa). She has published in the area(s) of gender, violence and family sociology.

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Negotiating everyday gender-based violence: Reflecting on fieldwork in India and South Africa