What is a “normal relationship”? Excitingly, this long-mulled-over question has at last been resolved. “Normal relationships are dynamic and unpredictable most of the time, and human beings are fickle,” Judge Thokozile Masipa said on Thursday, explaining why she was not convicting Oscar Pistorius of the murder of Reeva Steenkamp.
This dynamism, according to Masipa, is why Steenkamp professed herself in messages to Pistorius to be “scared of you sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me”. (This message was prescient, seeing as, on February 14, 2013, Pistorius was to pump her full of bullets.)
Steenkamp felt “attacked”, she wrote, by the person she “deserved protection from.” This, according to the judge, is a normal relationship. And thus, even though Pistorius killed Steenkamp, he did not murder her, according to the judge. Instead, she convicted him of culpable homicide.
I have been in relationships. Some of them were dynamic and some unpredictable. Never once, thank heavens, have I been “scared” of my partner, let alone felt the need to tell him that. Being scared of someone is not normal. Pistorius, however, has a different approach to relationships. An ex-girlfriend gave an interview yesterday describing how she would get so “scared” of him she “hid his gun.”
Judge Masipa is an extraordinary person. Indeed, part of the fascination in this case comes from the stories behind the two main players: Pistorius and Masipa. As my colleague David Smith wrote this week, the court provided a fascinating microcosm of how much South Africa has changed in the past few decades, with a black Zulu judge deciding the fate of a wealthy white Afrikaner.
Pistorius’s tale is, of course, well known. Masipa’s is not. Sixty-six years old, she is the second black woman in South Africa to attain the position of judge, and she did so by going to night school for 10 years while holding down a day job and raising two children. She is no pushover when it comes to the abuse of women.
She once sentenced a former prison officer to life imprisonment after he shot and killed his wife in an argument. “You are not a protector,” Masipa said. “You are a killer.”
The Steenkamps will doubtless feel frustration that the judge did not think the same about Pistorius, the man who Steenkamp wanted, to use her ambiguous phrase, “protection from”.
As an athlete, Pistorius argued passionately that a person’s backstory should not determine the public’s reaction to them — their achievements should be judged on merit (he thought better of this during his trial, when his “vulnerability” was repeatedly cited as a mitigating factor for killing Steenkamp). So admiration for Masipa should not stop us from asking questions.
Questions such as, how can a man pump four bullets into a bathroom door and be acquitted of intention to kill? And how can a judge as smart as Masipa think that Pistorius’s immediate horror at what he’d done is proof that he didn’t mean to kill, if not Steenkamp then at least somebody? These are some of the factors that convinced the judge not to convict him of premeditated murder (which was never going to happen anyway) or, much more surprisingly, dolus eventualis, a lesser charge of murder.
We know what it takes for people to believe that a woman has been abused by a famous, powerful man: they need to witness the actual abuse. The NFL only accepted that American footballer Ray Rice had done a Really Bad Thing when the video of him slugging his then fiancee Janay Palmer unconscious in an elevator was leaked this week. The earlier video of him dragging her unconscious out of the lift was, apparently, not good enough: the NFL had to see the punch because previously they’d apparently thought he knocked her out with a kiss.
Rice, like Pistorius, was simply too lucrative for the sporting industry to lose just because of a pesky domestic-abuse charge. Within minutes of Masipa wrapping up her verdict, South Africa’s Paralympic committee issued a statement that “if Pistorius wishes to resume his athletics career then we wouldn’t step in his way”. What’s a little culpable homicide between colleagues?
Glen Poole wrote on the Guardian’s Comment is free yesterday that the reason female-on-male domestic violence is not taken seriously is because of “a binary narrative that maintains our unconscious, collective belief that men are problems and women have problems.”
Female-on-male domestic abuse is a terrible problem for those who suffer from it, but the reason it is not acknowledged as much is because women, by and very large, cannot cause as much physical damage as men. Emotional damage, yes, but not physical.
A woman who is killed is most likely to be killed by a man; a man who is killed is most likely to be killed by a man.
The abuse of Janay Rice and the death of Reeva Steenkamp — and of Nicole Brown Simpson, while we’re talking about brutalised partners of celebrity athletes — remind us, were reminders needed, that men can cause unimaginable physical damage to the women they say they love. As a Johannesburg-based attorney told the Guardian yesterday, Masipa’s ruling sends out “a very negative message that you can kill someone and claim it was a mistake and get away with it”.
And this is an issue that, of course, goes far beyond celebrity. In South Africa, a woman is killed by her partner every eight hours. In the UK, two die a week. Perhaps Masipa was right after all. Perhaps this was a “normal relationship.” But that doesn’t make it right.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
