by Tessa Lewin

As you may know South Africa has one of the highest levels of domestic violence and rape of any country in the world. Ten years ago I was working on a research project in New Crossroads, Cape Town, and writing a thesis on Violence and Masculinities. We were looking at why, in a group of uniformly disadvantaged youth, some managed against all odds to succeed, while most did not. I was particularly interested in the gendered nature of violence in Cape Town, specifically amongst the group of young people we were looking at in our study. Why was violence a path so frequently adopted by men and rarely by women? I was also frustrated with the gendered nature of feminist politics on campus – both academically, and in activist circles. Gender, it seemed, was women’s issue, as (with a very few rare exceptions) was feminism.