Dr Emma Backe, new Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Law, recently shared with us her thoughts on what she is hoping to achieve with her postdoctoral research.

At which UCT Law unit are you doing your postdoc?

I am conducting my postdoctoral research under Associate Professor Kelley Moult in the Centre of Criminology at UCT Law.

What is the focus of your work?

I’m a feminist medical and legal anthropologist who works broadly on issues of gender-based violence (GBV), survivor-centered care, trauma, and feminist organising. My research has focused on conceptualisations of crisis and trauma vis-à-vis gendered violence; how NGOs and state assemblages construct conceptions of the perfect victim and affordances of empowerment; and the forms of coercion and capture that survivors encounter when seeking help. I’ve also published articles on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV); the intersections between intimate partner violence (IPV) and alcohol use in South Africa; and how we should ethically train and equip scholars working on issues of violence and vulnerable populations.

Where did you do your PhD, and what was your topic?

I completed my PhD in Anthropology at George Washington University in Washington DC, but my dissertation fieldwork was carried out in Cape Town. My PhD research used feminist ethnographic fieldwork to interrogate the politics and temporalities of care for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Cape Town. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021), I followed international dialogues around the “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence amidst COVID-19 lockdowns, and tracked the challenges for both survivors and service providers in the GBV sector. During my time in Cape Town, I followed survivors through the trajectories of support and protection ostensibly offered by the government, including the police stations, Magistrates’ courts and Thuthuzela Care Centres, into NGOs providing psychosocial care and convening community advocacy to address gender-based violence (GBV) in the Cape Flats. In so doing, I tracked the different dispensations of “victim-centred care” offered through government services, and talked to survivors about what “victim-centred care” meant for them. My dissertation explored the forms of institutional betrayal and abandonment, under the auspices of victim empowerment, that often force survivors to remain in abusive relationships for prolonged periods of time. I argue that time needs to be central to our understandings of survivors’ experiences of IPV so that we can expand the horizon of care and justice afforded to those who may have endured years of prolonged, yet often invisibilised, abuse.

How does your postdoc work build on your PhD, if at all?

In my PhD research, I spent a great deal of time analysing access to justice around Protection Orders for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). I worked with A/Prof Kelley Moult on an article on the barriers to justice for IPV survivors that we witnessed in Magistrates’ courts throughout the Western Cape (see “Dissonance, Discordance, and Disparity: The Impact of Differences in Papers, Processes, and People on Justice for Domestic Violence Survivors in South Africa”). But the research for this article was carried out before the Domestic Violence Amendment Act (DVAA) was passed in 2022. My postdoctoral research is similarly interested in access to justice and considers how police responsiveness and procedures around Protection Orders in the Magistrates’ courts have changed since the passage of the DVAA. The DVAA included a number of new affordances to make Protection Orders more accessible to survivors, including an online application portal and a Safety Monitoring Notice, but very little research has been done to track implementation. My postdoctoral research will help to address this knowledge gap.

What are you hoping to achieve with your postdoctoral work?

Given the recent declaration of gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster, we need to consider not only the scale of GBV in the country, but also whether the services that are being provided meaningfully and sensitively respond to the particular vulnerabilities and needs of survivors. When we are thinking about justice for IPV survivors, I hope that my research will contribute towards improving the accessibility, sensitivity and responsiveness of the justice system for survivors. I look forward to working with A/Prof Kelley Moult and other experts in the GBV space to develop our findings into white papers and policy briefs that could be considered as part of the National Strategic Plan (NSP) on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. Pillar 6 of the NSP is dedicated to evidence-based policy and research. Our research on the DVAA will ideally help to inform our knowledge and understanding around policy implementation and meaningful access to justice for vulnerable populations. I think that there are a lot of policy frameworks that claim to provide victim-friendly services but haven’t talked enough with survivors about what they want and need, including their definitions of justice. By engaging survivors in a sensitive and ethical way as part of my research, I hope that meaningful, tangible and effective justice can better cater to the specialised needs of GBV survivors.

What are you excited about in your current research?

Given the Centre’s orientation towards applied scholarship, and interest in decolonising criminology while exploring non-carceral approaches to justice, I am looking forward to engaging with the academics and students at the Centre of Criminology. I am also excited to conduct research on what is such an urgent issue for so many South Africans, bridging the divide between scholarship and practice.