Gendered discourse in the South African Police Service talk and text of domestic violence

Abstract

Despite working with an enabling gender policy framework, police officials in South Africa are accused of dealing unjustly with complainants of gender-based violence. This article explores and describes the gendered discourse in the talk, text and practice of the police that maintains and reproduces asymmetrical personal and social power relations between the police and domestic violence survivors. The article is based on research findings that revealed that police construct unequal feminine and masculine roles. Their conceptions of these roles are often enmeshed with other relations of power such as class, sex, religion and culture. The article suggests that changing the attitudes and practices of the police requires critical reflection on how violence is contextually embedded and inequality is reproduced at subconscious and structural levels through a process of coloniality long after the demise of colonialism and apartheid.