TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 10

Subsection 11

■ PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE

86 The Commission’s conception of gross violations of human rights explicitly included mental or psychological torture in its definition of torture. Nevertheless, commenting on the first five weeks of hearings, Fiona Ross wrote that “the main focus has been on bodies and on the visible embodiment of suffering”.¹⁹ It was not insignificant that psychologists were prominent among the CALS grouping and that the two opening addresses in the Cape Town women’s hearings were by psychologists Ms Nomfundo Walaza and Ms Cheryl de la Rey.

87 It is often difficult to distinguish between physical and psychological abuse. Many of the stories indicated the way in which physical abuse was exacerbated by psychological. Many also showed how physical abuse was used to humiliate the victims. Women, more than men, were prepared to talk about psychological aspects of their experience. Women were also more likely than men to talk about the psychosomatic and psychological problems experienced afterwards.

88 Ms Dee Dicks, for example, told the children and youth hearing that she had been arrested and charged with public violence at the age of seventeen: “[T]he experience that I lived through in the 1980s is like forever in my mind. And it has become quite difficult for me to cope and it makes me very angry, because at that time I could and now I cannot”. Ms Zubeida Jaffer who, after sustained torture, signed a statement, said that “it completely made me feel like I was worthless, that I had gone against everything that I stood for… and I was never able to overcome it for many, many years.” Ms Joyce Sikhakhane Ranken, tortured twenty-six years previously, said she still often found herself “back in the dungeons of solitary confinement, ready to take away my life… I hate it when my mind brings those terrifying memories, but my mind just does it for me,” Ms Jetta Sethwala spoke about how, after the death of her son, the Paballelo community accused her of ‘shopping’ him to the police for money. She said she felt she was “already dead” and that it “will take a lot of effort to make me entirely normal again”. Ms Ruth First and Ms Jenny Schreiner have both described how they tried to kill themselves while in detention.

89 One possibility is that women were more affected than men psychologically. Another possibility is that men had more need, because of socialisation, to see the abuse as a test of their strength. If this is true, by listening to women we can also learn something about men’s unacknowledged suffering.

90 Solitary confinement and detention are, in themselves, psychological abuses. Often, however, psychological abuse was used consciously by captors to achieve their purposes. In many instances, their tactics focused on the victim’s female roles. Thus, Ms Lydia Kompe said she was asked: “What do you think your husband thinks about you? This is the reason why all the men are getting divorced”.²⁰ Ms Jenny Schreiner related how she was subjected to

ruthless prying into an area of a person’s personal life that they knew was vulnerable … and in a context where they are going to send you back to a police cell to sit with nothing other than the emotions that they’ve scratched open. You’re thirty and you’re single, therefore there’s something wrong with you as a woman, and that’s why you get involved with politics.²¹

91 Similarly, Ms Thenjiwe Mtintso described taunts that women combatants had joined because they had failed to find a husband, to look after their children, or because they were unpaid prostitutes:

This consistency of drawing away from your own activism, from your own commitment as an actor, was perhaps worse than torture, was worse than the physical assault… when even what you have stood for is reduced to prostitution, unpaid prostitution.

92 Many women related how threats to their children or other family members were used to try to extract information from them. Ms Zubeida Jaffer signed a statement only when police threatened that her father would be detained, and put him on the telephone to confirm the veracity of the threat: “I was shattered at that point. I just felt that it's fine if they involve me, but why involve my family to this extent, and why involve my father?”

93 Ms Deborah Matshoba recounted how she had only broken down and cried when she was eventually allowed to see her son and family:

You can go very strong when they beat you up and you become stubborn and you stand your ground, but once they start being kind to you it can, it is a very, very delicate spot.

94 Ms Sylvia Nomhle Dlamini described how her child was taken away from her when it wanted to suck. In the end, she stopped breast-feeding and the child became very sickly. This and subsequent events left Ms Dlamini insecure about her ability as a mother: “I don't know whether I acted in the proper manner; I doubt myself as a mother.”

95 Ms Thandi Shezi was told that her children had been handed over to welfare, “and if I didn't tell them the truth, they would kill my children”. Ms Shirley Gunn had a young toddler and was eight months pregnant when she was detained in 1989. Her alleged crime was that she had blown up Khotso House, a deed which, it was later confirmed, was actually performed by agents of the then government. Ms Gunn found her detention particularly hard “at a point in my life where I as a woman really needed to be with other woman and I really needed to be with my mother too, specifically.” Despite her objections, Ms Gunn’s toddler was taken away from her. She now feels she suffers from an exaggerated and irrational fear that she will lose her child.

96 In some cases, there was evidence that a woman’s social role was to her advantage. When police first came to detain Ms Jubie Mayet, she pointed to her fatherless children and asked whether they were now going to deprive them of their mother as well: “Some of the children started crying and I remember son number three saying through his tears: ‘No, they cannot do this, they cannot take our mother away from us.’” The police left without Ms Mayet, although she was indeed arrested at a later stage. Similarly, Ms Marie Odendaal Magwaza said she heard from another detainee that the security police complained to him that she “had been cheeky and if it had not been for the baby he would have detained me”.

97 On the other hand, Ms Phyllis Naidoo described how her maternal duties and feelings were ignored when she was sentenced to ten days imprisonment on failing to report as prescribed by her banning order when her son suffered an asthma attack during her law exams.