In collaboration with the Social Justice Agency (SJA) and the Armah Institute for Emotional Justice

Introduction

South Africa continues to grapple with one of the highest rates of gender-based violence (GBV) in the world. Yet while public discourse often focuses on individual acts of violence, far less attention is paid to the social, historical, and emotional conditions that make such violence possible. In September 2026, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), in partnership with the Social Justice Agency (SJA), and the Armah Institute for Emotional Justice hosted a Moving Masculinities and Emotional Justice conversation facilitated by renowned journalist, playwright, and founder of the Armah Institute for Emotional Justice, Esther Armah. The dialogue sought to address a difficult but urgent question: What would it mean to transform masculinity in a society where violence has become normalized and emotional suppression is passed from generation to generation?

The conversation formed part of the Antiracism, Social Cohesion and Inclusion Project and brought together participants to explore the intersections of patriarchy, racism, emotional justice, and social transformation. Rather than treating gender-based violence as an isolated phenomenon, the dialogue is situated within a much deeper history of structural violence and emotional harm.

The Historical Roots of Violence

To understand the contemporary GBV crisis, it is necessary to confront the historical systems that have shaped South African society. Colonialism, apartheid, racial capitalism, and patriarchy did not simply produce political and economic inequality. They also created cultures of domination grounded in violence, control, and the dehumanisation of Black and Brown bodies.

For centuries, violence was institutionalised as an acceptable means of governing populations, extracting labour, and maintaining racial hierarchies. Black people were subjected to forced removals, land dispossession, migrant labour systems, police brutality, and daily forms of structural humiliation. Families were fragmented by labour migration, while communities experienced ongoing social and economic precarity. Violence became woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Patriarchy reinforced these dynamics by establishing systems in which men were expected to exercise authority and control, while women were expected to carry the burdens of care, survival, and emotional labour. These expectations were intensified within contexts of racial oppression, where Black women in particular were required to bear the cumulative weight of racism, sexism, and economic marginalisation.

The consequences of these historical realities remain visible today. Gender-based violence is not merely the result of individual pathology or criminal behaviour. It is linked to longstanding social norms that normalize domination, reward emotional detachment, and equate power with control. Black and Brown communities often experience the highest levels of violence not because violence is inherent to these communities, but because they continue to bear the deepest scars of historical dispossession, structural inequality, and intergenerational trauma.

Emotional Justice and the Politics of Feeling

Central to Esther Armah’s contribution was the concept of Emotional Justice, an approach that examines how systems of oppression shape emotional experiences and determine whose pain is acknowledged, who is expected to endure suffering, and whose humanity is recognized.

The discussion challenged participants to consider emotional life as a political issue rather than a private matter. White supremacy and patriarchy, Armah argued, work together to create highly unequal emotional expectations for different groups of people. They determine who has the freedom to express vulnerability and who must instead adopt survival strategies that suppress or conceal emotional pain.

Within this framework, women are often expected to absorb collective hardship while continuing to sustain households, communities, and workplaces. Their resilience becomes a social expectation rather than a choice. They are tasked with managing grief, nurturing families, maintaining relationships, and navigating public spaces with constant vigilance. In South Africa, women are frequently expected to carry unpaid care responsibilities while simultaneously participating in the formal economy, creating an invisible burden that remains largely unacknowledged.

Men, meanwhile, are frequently socialised into a different form of emotional constraint. Many are taught that vulnerability is weakness, and that strength requires silence, self-reliance, and emotional control. Fear, sadness, and grief are often suppressed, while anger emerges as one of the few socially permissible emotional expressions.

The result is what Armah described as a profound lack of emotional infrastructure: the language, tools, relationships, and spaces necessary for people to understand and process their emotions. In the absence of such infrastructure, unresolved trauma can become externalised through domination, coercion, and violence. This dynamic does not excuse harmful behaviour, but it helps explain how deeply entrenched patterns of violence are reproduced across generations.

The Urgency of the Present Moment

The conversation took on particular urgency in light of the recent discovery of multiple women’s bodies in and around Kempton Park and Ekurhuleni. These killings have intensified public concern about the ongoing crisis of violence against women and girls.

Participants reflected critically on institutional responses that place responsibility on women to protect themselves. Advisories urging women to be “more cautious” or to restrict their movements were identified as examples of a broader societal tendency to shift responsibility away from perpetrators and onto those most at risk.

From an Emotional Justice perspective, such responses place additional emotional and psychological burdens on women while failing to confront the behaviours and systems that produce violence. Rather than asking why women are unsafe, the discussion argued that society must ask why men continue to perpetrate violence and what social conditions sustain those behaviours.

This shift from perspective is crucial. It moves the conversation beyond risk management and toward transformation. It asks not how women should adapt to violence, but how communities, institutions, and men themselves must change to end it.

Building New Models of Masculinity

Despite the gravity of the discussion, the conversation was also grounded in possibility. Several practical outcomes emerged from the dialogue. Participants committed to establishing grassroots spaces where men can engage in honest conversations about grief, trauma, identity, and accountability. These spaces are intended to provide opportunities for men to unlearn harmful patriarchal norms and to build healthier emotional practices.

The dialogue also highlighted opportunities to integrate Moving Masculinities conversations into broader community engagement initiatives, ensuring that emotional literacy becomes part of local leadership, civic participation, and social cohesion efforts.

In addition, the IJR and Esther Armah’s network will explore opportunities for collaborative public education and media initiatives aimed at reshaping public narratives around GBV. Such efforts seek to shift the focus away from instructing women how to avoid violence and toward challenging the social norms and emotional conditions that enable violence to occur.

A further area of collaboration includes supporting existing Moving Masculinities work in Stellenbosch, creating structured spaces where young men and boys can develop emotional awareness, process inherited trauma, and participate in building more equitable social relationships.

Towards Emotional Justice

Ending gender-based violence requires more than stronger laws and improved policing, although both remain important. It also requires confronting the emotional and cultural foundations of violence itself.

The collaboration between the IJR, SJA, and AIEJ demonstrates the importance of creating spaces where difficult conversations about race, gender, power, and emotional life can take place. By linking emotional justice to social justice, the dialogue challenged participants to recognize that violence is neither inevitable nor natural. It is produced through systems, norms, and histories, and therefore can be transformed.

The task ahead is not simply to respond to violence after it occurs. It is to build emotional, social, and political conditions that make violence less possible. In a society marked by deep histories of racial oppression, patriarchal power, and collective trauma, the work of transforming masculinity is not peripheral to justice. It is central to it.