War and epidemic, or how we've been thinking about rape

Finally, after months of confusion, I woke up with the title to my PhD. This is 'War and Epidemic, or the Science of Rape.' The departure point will be the 2012 UN meeting in which participants declared that violence could be ended in a generation, using the science of prevention that was emerging. I'm going to look more closely at this claim through the example of South Africa which, in some respects, has made key contributions to this science of prevention. The country was both represented at the UN meeting and provided some of the evidence and practice base exciting experts’ attention. Further confirmation of its leading role came in 2014 with the launch of Britain’s Department for International Development programme “What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls.” This has been housed with South Africa’s Medical Research Council (MRC), which also acts as the Secretariat to the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI). In partnership with the World Bank Group, the SVRI issued a call in 2015 to distribute up to $1.2 million to projects preventing violence against women in low and middle-income countries That South Africa has come to occupy this position was by no means inevitable. I'm going to trace the history of how it did so, largely using 1976 as the point of departure. This was the year when Rape Crisis Cape Town, the first feminist rape crisis centre in the country was established.

At this point, the number of rapes reported to the police, represented the closest thing to a science of rape. In some respects, they still do. These figures, their fluctuations and the ways they interact with other statistics, have produced a bewildering array of numbers, along with ways of thinking about social and moral dis/order. They have constituted a besieged and violated feminine nation whose bodies provide the terrain upon which war is fought. At the same time they have also created moral community and belonging, and ranked and positioned the country. They have provided a particular political resource and drawn complex relations between women, the state and ideals of freedom. While these statistics chiefly constitute rape as war, they also create rape as epidemic - the focus of the second part of the paper. In this section I examine how medical technologies, and the struggle for post-exposure prophylaxis to prevent infection with HIV, made rape the pivot upon which life and death turned, with the state figured as women's executioner. This was to bring rape within the orbit of then-President Mbeki's dissenting views on AIDS. Ironically, where Mbeki's questioning sought to undermine AIDS as a legitimately scientific biological entityt, his querying of the rape statistics and the claims allied to these was to introduce science to rape, largely in the form of epidemiological reason.

From there, I then look at the studies around prevention and the administration of masculine subjectivity. The section will conclude by looking at the creation of new feminine subjects - adolescent girls and young women.

I'm not sure what my conclusions are just yet ( the 'and so?' question) but that's the basic outline. It is more focused than my first attempt at a paper.