Paper short abstract:

Keywords: Gender-based violence, Sandton, Alexandra Township, Intersectionality.

Paper long abstract:

Gender-based violence continues to escalate in South African communities despite various interventions and consciousness-raising efforts. Women, children, queer societal members are often at the receiving end of the violence that is more often than not perpetrated by heterosexual men, denoting the discriminative heteronormative culture that persists in spite of the progressive constitution and its assurance of gender equality. While it is true that gender-based violence has been a burning issue in South Africa, it is important to recognise that the current COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns have unearthed the need to examine the context in which gender-based violence is normalised in intimate unions and in communities. Subsequently, there is a need to understand how gender-based violence travels in ways that frame spaces as safe and/or unsafe - shaping the background in which vulnerability is experienced in contextual ways. It is this objective that this paper seeks to address by unpacking lived experiences of gender-based violence among women in two socio-economically contrasting albeit closely located South African spaces. Through ethnographic voices, this paper indicates that gender-based violence is deeply entrenched in intersectional and patriarchal localities. It is reproduced through economic agencies that are shaped by internalised views of safe and unsafe spaces. Safe in this context refers to perceptions of spaces as prone to violent encounters - a perception that is commonly associated with township spaces as opposed to suburbs that tend to be viewed as 'safe'.