4.3 MAIN FINDINGS
4.3.3 Violence demonstrates love
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• Sexual activity (including rape) is a marker of masculinity
• Girls are responsible for controlling a man‟s sexual urge (WHO & LSHTM, 2010)
The following theme discusses love as the reason for girls to stay in abusive relationships.
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“But its blind love. It‟s difficult to understand that a person may hit you numerous times but you still go back to them. From the outside you may conclude by thinking that maybe he really does love her.” -Angel
“Another thing is that I think, I don‟t know, is that it is within our nature. Us, women think that we can change a man. He can beat you tomorrow but you have hope that one day he will change.” -Zethu
Love as discussed above still prevails and one of the main reasons for victims of abuse to stay in abusive relationships. The participants spoke mostly of other people they knew and highlighted that it was not appropriate to remain in such relationships. Apologising for inflicting abuse was also equated to expressing love. The girls‟ „love‟ relationships left them sad and depressed, hoping that their partners would change for the better. The participants‟ statements did not support the issue of tolerating partner abuse. Angel saw it as „blind love‟, and even if she did want to help, the victim did not appreciate it.
Reproduction of traditional norms over generations also appeared as Zethu spoke of parents‟ way of protecting their partners, having an influence to how a girl may also find herself protecting a lover.
Shefer, Strebel, and Foster (2000) observed similar patterns in their research at the University of Cape Town. They noted that female students often tolerated abuse from their partners due to the belief that they were loved. The participants‟ notion of love was deeply embedded in the belief that when you love someone, you have to endure any hardships that comes along the way; in other words, love endures everything. When I asked the participants about the reasons why students stay in abusive relationships, this very belief came out as one of the factors that make female students stay in abusive relationships. The individual responses follow:
“Women allow men to abuse them. What else can she do? She loves him. We black people believe that when you love someone you have you endure hardships.” -Inelly
The above participant mentioned that women had themselves to blame for their victimisation but also contradicted herself by stating that women have no choice but to stay in a relationship while there is still a portion of love that exists. Mbali and Sho also emphasised the powerful influence of love in women‟s choices. Sho further added that leaving an abusive relationship only happened if a woman was not serious about the relationship, suggesting that commitment to a relationship was coupled with the acceptance of abuse.
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“People see that such relationships are not conducive but still stay because they say, „I love him/her.‟”-Mbali
“Love is love. You can‟t leave a person for just abusing you. You can even go for counselling before you take the decision to separate, unless you were just playing around.” -Sho
The construction of what is meant by the love which may also be argued that it comes from how the females construct their meanings. Zethu mentioned that a love relationship protected the perpetrator of IPV because abuse within a relationship was considered acceptable and justified by love.
“Others say that “love protects”, it protects one‟s dignity in front of others. It protects the perpetrator from public scrutiny and judgements that he hits his girlfriend. Others say that they love their partners, so it‟s okay if they are being abused by those they love.” –Zethu
Many participants saw love and abuse being intertwined. According to them, love was demonstrated when a partner inflicted violence onto the other no matter how inappropriate it was. Participants depicted irony in the sense that love was supposed to be a good thing yet they suffered within its confines.
It seemed that the participants‟ focus on love was more on the positive aspect of making it work for the sake of love instead of the negative dimension of the relationship. According to Dare, Guadagno, and Muscanell (2013) focusing on the positive side of the relationship helps the victim to cope with the abuse because if they leave, they will experience high volumes of dissonance which results from the negative outlook on the relationship. Hayes (2015) explains that abused women may see that they do not have enough choice but to stay and endure whatever pain they experience in the relationship. Mbali spoke about knowledge of sexual abuse in intimate relationships:
“A friend has told me of her boyfriend forcing himself on her after she refused to have sex with him. The boyfriend‟s reasoning was that they are already in a relationship.” -Mbali
According to Jewkes et al. (2010) often, forced sex by an intimate partner is not perceived as rape due to the high stigmatisation of the matter. Consequently, women cannot refuse sex forced by an intimate partner. Similarly, in his study Cadena (2011) found that 70% of women had forced sex with their partners for fear of consequences if they refused to have sex. Also, Vetten (2014) alludes that men who rape normalise it and perceive it as a sexual entitlement and a benefit for being in love.
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Some participants mentioned that it was important to be in a relationship and maintain it at all costs. The thought of existing an outside the relationship is far more painful than the idea of staying and coping within that relationship (Hayes, 2015). Some participants believed that to a man demonstrates his love by hitting you. Sammy said that at some point she came to a situation where she wished to know how it felt like to get a slap on the face from her boyfriend.
“Some girls glorify being abused. Some go as far as telling you all the details, for instance, „he pressed his knee down my throat‟ as if they enjoyed it.”- Sammy To them love comes with a limited extent of pain if you have not felt pain, it means that you are not serious about the relationship. Power, Koch, Kralik, and Jackson (2006) argue that leaving an abusive relationship is very difficult for women because society legitimates that the central existence which is the development of self and femininity of women is linked to ideas to love and to be loved. Hayes (2015, p. 2) alludes that “belief in romantic love prioritises relational maintenance above all else and suggests that, „love itself can overcome all obstacles‟, even abuse.” The above extracts also demonstrate the relative powerlessness that some girls experience when it comes to love and relationships. Ganley, 1995; Payne and Wermeling (2009) argue that there are no personality profiles of women who go through IPV, meaning that the geographic area of a person does not always determine the likelihood of experiencing IPV. Consequently, social constructionism as a framework for this study comes out. From the females account both FG discussions and individual interviews, I established that being single or being without men was perceived as not good and thus the tolerance of abuse in the name of love. The next theme discusses materialism, „sugar-daddies‟ and IPV.