How serious is the government about tackling GBV?
Some people in some sections in government are serious. For others it's just an excuse for a bit of political spectacle.
Presidential summits on GBV, 16 Days of Activism and so on?
Yes, we use speech as a substitute for action. We think if we stand up often enough and denounce GBV, that somehow magically makes the problem disappear and makes government more competent.
There's been action on the legislative front, hasn't there?
Yes, but we need better analysis to understand what we're doing that's ineffective, instead of a knee-jerk jump towards changing the laws at every opportunity. Blaming gaps in the law bypasses all those more difficult questions about why the laws aren't being implemented effectively. Those raise very uncomfortable questions about the quality of the police, the courts, our health-care system, social development and ability to think beyond the law as a response to GBV.
Are you saying there've been no real improvements in government responses to GBV?
Whenever you respond on government you always have to acknowledge those individuals who are doing their utmost. But the fact that you have to rely on individuals points to the weaknesses and failures in the system. That it's individuals that make it work, not the system. You can see some improvement in the response of the police, but overall I think their performance has gone backwards. I'd say the same with the courts. Measure the number of GBV cases put down for prosecution as a proportion of the number of reports being made, and you see a definite decline.
And the conviction rate?
Just over half what it was in 2013/2014, using the national prosecuting authority’s statistics.
Because of poor police work?
It's that. It's also a reflection of state capture when the NPA was systematically weakened. Corruption in terms of procurement is also part of why we have a DNA backlog. So you've got to look at the broader failures in government to understand that they also impact on issues like GBV.
How much longer can we blame state capture for the backlogs at police forensic laboratories?
The failure to analyse DNA doesn't explain why declining numbers of rape cases are being prosecuted.
Haven't 200 cases of rape and murder been dropped because of a lack of DNA evidence?
Yes, those problems remain. But our challenge is that we haven't developed a sufficiently fine-grained analysis of the problem. We tend to reduce it to a single thing like the backlog in forensic laboratories, or state capture. We need to look at a whole cluster of things that have come together to create this situation, and then try to tackle each one of them rather than putting it all under one umbrella and coming up with very vague options. The fact that we seem incapable of using data as a pointer to where problems and solutions might lie, rather than as a political football, is part of the issue. We don't use what is available and look at it critically to come up with new ideas beyond just, “oh, let's have another law”.
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