Pistorius’ sentence sends the wrong message
The decision of Judge Thokozile Masipa to give Oscar Pistorius a five-year sentence for culpable homicide is baffling. In her ruling, she stated “a non-custodial sentence will send the wrong message to the community”. This statement was clearly referencing Pistorius’s celebrity status, with Judge Masipa noting: “It would be a sad day for this country if an impression was created that there is one law for the poor and disadvantaged and another for the rich and famous”. But what about the message this sends to women and men who are scared in relationships? What about partners who are abusive?
If you read any interviews conducted with Oscar Pistorius’s previous girlfriends, one thing becomes clear very quickly: Oscar Pistorius is not the nicest of men. Although Jenna Edkins, the woman Pistorius secretly phoned just hours before he shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp, stuck up for him during his trial, other former flames were not left so enamoured.
Samantha Taylor, who dated Pistorius for 18 months in 2011, stated during her testimony at the trial: “He gets so mad, so angry he can hardly speak”. She talked about how she was bitten, bruised and sometimes locked in the house by the athlete. Sadly, she also described how on one evening, after Oscar had gotten drunk with friends, she hid his gun from him as she feared it might go off. How very prescient.
After the tragic shooting of Reeva Steenkamp, Taylor’s mother wrote a book entitled Oscar Pistorius: An accident waiting to happen. If she is to be believed, she laid down the law in late October 2012 and told Pistorius to leave her daughter alone. Again, prescient.
Steenkamp had sent Pistorius a Whatsapp message on January 23rd 2013 to say: “I’m scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me”. This, along with Taylor’s statement, builds a picture of a man who displayed aggression towards his girlfriends, and liked to play with guns. It was a recipe for disaster. It is also a recipe known to other households.
Statistically, Reeva Steenkamp was one of three women to be killed in South Africa on Valentine’s Day 2013 by an ‘intimate partner’. This figure, as shocking as it is, is likely to be an understatement. According to an August 2013 report by Professor Rachel Jewkes of the South African Medical Research Council, no perpetrator is identified in 20 per cent of the killings.
Sadly, South Africa’s problem with violence against women runs deeper. Approximately 200,000 women are reported as being attacked every year. South African children invented a playground game known as ‘rape rape’, where boys chase girls and simulated sexually attacking them. "Research has found both partner violence and non-partner rape are fundamentally related to unequal gender norms, power inequalities and dominant ideals of manhood that support violence and control over women", stated Bethan Cansfield of the charity Womankind. Something has gone wrong in South Africa, and these attitudes towards women clearly need to be addressed.
That is something the Pistorius case has not done. No message has been sent. In the 439-word judgement produced by Thokozile Masipa, Reeva’s name does not appear once. She is referred to as “his girlfriend” at the beginning, but is then forgotten. The trial was all about Oscar Pistorius. The language is all about Oscar Pistorius. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian even went so far as to argue that Pistorius should not be jailed because his life had been ruined enough already, as if we should be talking about saving the man from the consequences of his own actions! Actions that saw him shoot his girlfriend in the hip, arm, and fatally, the head.
The female is the voiceless protagonist, which was strikingly clear in the trial. After Steenkamp’s tragic story, we were left only with Pistorius’s words in the form of his testimony. It looks something like this: after waking up scared for his and his girlfriend’s safety because he thought that a burglar was climbing in through his bathroom window, he leaves his girlfriend asleep and unarmed to go to the bathroom, and not hearing a reply to his shout, fires a round or two through the locked door. Except the burglar he thought he’d eliminate wasn’t behind the door, it was Miss Steenkamp, who’d decided to go quietly to the toilet.
According to this version of events, Steenkamp was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Pistorius is entirely a victim of circumstance. There’s nothing to be read into the fact that Steenkamp apparently made sure she didn’t wake up Pistorius as she went to the bathroom. Or that she was apparently too scared to respond to her boyfriend shouting to her. Again, Steenkamp was voiceless.
Even then there is one implication that remains terribly clear: for Reeva Steenkamp, the wrong place at the wrong time is her boyfriend’s house, just the two of them, in the middle of the night. A terrifying scenario, compounded by the fact that he had a history of aggression and violence towards women, and yet will most likely walk from his cell in ten months time.
Surely here was an excellent time for South Africa to begin to confront its problem with violence against women? To send a message to society that violence against women is a crime, and that it will not be tolerated. Instead, the price of Reeva Steenkamp’s life was valued at five years, with an option of house arrest after ten months, and her name faded away at her own trail. Yes, a non-custodial sentence would have sent a wrong message to the community, but so does a short one. The man was not the victim here, and everyone would do well to remember that.
First published in Varsity Online on 27/10/14.
