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This December edition of SACQ doesn`t offer particularly good festive cheer. If anything it highlights the enormous challenges facing our society as well as our criminal justice system. Yet, the other side of this tarnished coin is that there are researchers, practitioners and academics who are conducting research, making recommendations and trying to find ways to fix what is broken, both in the criminal justice system and in society more generally. That is the good news.
The international conference hosted by the Crime and Justice Programme in early December provided an opportunity for researchers from South Africa and internationally to share the findings of research conducted on issues of crime and the criminal justice system. The findings of several new and innovative research projects were presented at the conference. A collection of the papers presented at the conference will be published by the ISS in 2011. This research contributes to the development of increasingly strong baseline, or foundational work on the nature of offending and the response of the criminal justice system, which is essential to informing how we respond to the problem of crime in South Africa.
We start this edition with an overview and analysis of the 2009/10 crime statistics, made public by the SAPS in September. This is followed by an article by David Bruce that grapples with how we think and talk about violent crime. Bruce takes as his starting point the reference that is often made in public forums, and in private spaces, to the `fact` that it is not just the extent of violent crime in South Africa that is troubling, but also the apparently cruel use of violence during the commission of a crime – often referred to as `gratuitous violence`. He interrogates the use of the term `gratuitous` and offers thoughts about the motives that underpin the use of apparently excessive, or cruel acts of aggression.
The picture painted by the work done by the Medical Science Research Council, presented in the article by Rachel Jewkes et al, is bleak. The study, conducted in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, found that more than a quarter of the respondents (who were all male) had, at some time in their lives, forced a woman to have sex with them against her will. The victims included intimate partners, strangers, and acquaintances. In addition, ‘among those who raped, the majority had raped more than once.’ These findings are unpleasant for a number of reasons. They tell us that something is desperately wrong with the way in which men view and behave towards women. They also tell us that addressing sexual offending requires us to address the socialisation of boys.
The article by Andrew Faull reflects the findings of focus group discussions that were conducted to deepen our understanding of police corruption and the effect of acts of police corruption on citizen perceptions of the police. The article offers examples of how the sexist behaviour of male police officers translates into an abuse of power and undermines the image of the police. Thus the article reaffirms the need for us to take seriously, and remedy, the vast power imbalances between genders.
We conclude with an interview with Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, conducted by Johan Burger, in which the Minister speaks about the way in which he aims to improve command and control and how he believes the return to military ranks will contribute to improving command and control.
In the coming year I hope that SACQ will continue to provide a forum for the presentation of new research data, and for thinking about crime and criminal justice in South Africa. I particularly welcome articles that build on work that has previously been published in this journal so that it can become a space to debate and deepen our knowledge and understanding of the complexity of crime.
Chandré Gould (editor)
