Gender based violence is widely prevalent in South African society, but male rape is often a neglected area. According to The Conversation, in an article by Prof Louise Du Toit, men make up around 10% of victims of sexual violence.

The group South African Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse says one in six adult males in the country have been victims of sexual offences in their lifetimes and, in 2012, almost 20% of all sexual abuse victims were male. But men are up to 10 times less likely than women to report sexual violence against them. Frequently men who report sexual assault are accused of being gay. In addition, according to Prof Du Toit, “Some feminist activists are reluctant to focus on the male victims because they think it will undermine long-fought-for attention for female victims.”

Silent Scream is a refreshing acknowledgement of this disturbing picture, told firsthand by a survivor of multiple instances of sexual violence, including gang rape and other forms of physical and sexual violence.

The author is a man in his fifties, intelligent and multifaceted, who carried the weight of the ages on his tattooed shoulders. Following a childhood marred by distant parents, he was assaulted in his late teens.

This is a book filled with hurt, with anger, with events that should never occur, but that the author has been able to rise above. It’s also a book about recovery, redemption, and the power of healing. No punches are pulled. It’s a very necessary book for our country and our time.

Never have seven people been so hunted. By assassins. By journalists and lawyers in search of the truth and then TRC investigators wanting justice for the victims’ families.

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were a ‘terrorist’ MK cell. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and another inquest in 1989. Finally, the fact that Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit plotted and drove the operation was revealed at the Truth and Reconciliation ten years after the murders but Vlakplaas’s real agenda remained shrouded in mystery.

Hunting the Seven tells the story of the hunt for the truth of the Gugulethu Seven in cinematic style. It took a decade to get to the bottom of the killings.

Sifting through the evidence and original interviews with those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and an elaborate state-sanctioned snuff movie designed to keep the money rolling into the death squad’s slush fund.

A searing, intimate memoir tracing the author’s attempt to find out the truth about her father’s murder.

Robin McGregor, an older man living in a small town outside Cape Town, is brutally murdered in his home. Cecil Thomas is convicted for the crime, but his trial leaves more questions than answers. His daughter, Liz, tries to move beyond her grief but she still wants answers. What drove Thomas to torture and kill a complete stranger?

The author meets the murderer’s family and discovers that he comes from a loving, comfortable home. He is educated and skilled – there is no apparent reason for his descent into delinquency. After protracted obstruction from the prison authorities, she finally gets to confront him but not without putting herself in danger. She finds answers, but not the answers she is looking for.

Unforgiven tells a story seldom told: what happens to a family when one of their own is murdered?

In hierdie opvolg op Daniël Lötter se eerste bundel moordverhale, 17 Maal Moord, wat einde 2020 verskyn het, vertel hy nog van Suid-Afrika se mees opspraakwekkende ware moordverhale in sy gemaklike en dikwels humoristies styl.

Nuwe lewe word geblaas in die slagoffers sowel as oortreders wat Suid-Afrikaners destyds na hul asem laat snak en dié verhale laat verslind het.

A young girl on the Cape Flats is gifted in exchange for a bottle of alcohol, a woman is beaten by her boyfriend and told to bezekela (persevere), a businesswoman is asked for sexual favours to secure a contract, while a child rapist is released on bail after three years...

South Africa is a country at war with its women. Rarely a woman can be found who has not been the victim of some kind of abuse or does not know a friend or a family member who has. Gender-based violence takes many different forms – emotional, financial, physical, sexual and structural – and it can be meted out by strangers, intimate partners or a family member.

Many women are overcome by a sense of shame when they are sexually or emotionally abused but sharing what was once a secret, helps to break shame’s hold. ‘I am not defined by the abuse I have suffered,’ writes Sue Nyathi. ‘I am not a victim; I am a survivor.’

In When Secrets Become Stories, women from all walks of life, across racial lines, age and income demographics, boldly speak out. With contributions by Lorraine Sithole, Desiree-Anne Martin, Mamokgethi Phakeng, Shafinaaz Hassim, Cathy Park Kelly and Olivia Jasriel, who as a child was sexually abused by tennis star Bob Hewitt.

In this galvanizing book for all educators, Kristin Souers and Pete Hall explore an urgent and growing issue-childhood trauma-and its profound effect on learning and teaching. Grounded in research and the authors' experience working with trauma-affected students and their teachers, Fostering Resilient Learners will help you cultivate a trauma-sensitive learning environment for students across all content areas, grade levels, and educational settings. The authors-a mental health therapist and a veteran principal-provide proven, reliable strategies to help you: Understand what trauma is and how it hinders the learning, motivation, and success of all students in the classroom. Build strong relationships and create a safe space to enable students to learn at high levels. Adopt a strengths-based approach that leads you to recalibrate how you view destructive student behaviors and to perceive what students need to break negative cycles. Head off frustration and burnout with essential self-care techniques that will help you and your students flourish. Each chapter also includes questions and exercises to encourage reflection and extension of the ideas in this book. As an educator, you face the impact of trauma in the classroom every day. Let this book be your guide to seeking solutions rather than dwelling on problems, to building relationships that allow students to grow, thrive, and-most assuredly-learn at high levels.

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

Female Fear Factory is the much-anticipated follow up to the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award winner Rape: A South African Nightmare.

Where Rape: A South African Nightmare introduced strategies for disrupting rape culture at an individual level, Female Fear Factory offers an even bolder vision for collective action against all cultures of sexual violence.

Like the previous book on which it builds, Female Fear Factory fuses intellectual rigour and extensive research, written by one of South Africa's keenest minds, award-winning Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola.

Indigenous societies that are steeped in patriarchy have various channels through which they deal with abusive characteristics of relations in some of these communities. One such route is through songs, which sanction women to voice that which, bound by societal expectations, they would not normally be able to say. This book focuses on the nature of women’s contemporary songs in the rural community of Zwelibomvu, near Pinetown in KwaZulu-Natal. It aims to answer the question ‘Bahlabelelelani – Why do they sing?’, drawing on a variety of discourses of gender and power to examine the content and purposes of the songs.

Restricted by the custom of hlonipha, women resort to allusive language, such as is found in ukushoza, a song genre that includes poetic elements and solo dance songs. Other contexts include women’s social events, such as ilima, which refers to the collective activity that takes place when a group of women come together to assist another woman to complete a task that is typically carried out by women. During umgcagco (traditional weddings) and umemulo (girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies), songs befitting the occasion are performed. And neighbouring communities come together at amacece to perform according to izigodi (districts), where local maskandi women groups may be found performing for a goat or cow stake.

The songs, when read in conjunction with the interviews and focus group discussions, present a complex picture of women’s lives in contemporary rural KwaZulu-Natal, and they offer their own commentary on what it means to be a woman in this society.

Some argued it would save the U.S. after 9/11. Instead, the CIA's enhanced interrogation program came to be defined as American torture. The Forever Prisoner, a primary source for the recent HBO Max film directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, exposes the full story behind the most divisive CIA operation in living memory.Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. Arguing that Abu Zubaydah had been trained to resist interrogation and was withholding vital clues, the CIA authorized Mitchell and others to use brutal "enhanced interrogation techniques" that would have violated U.S. and international laws had not government lawyers rewritten the rulebook.In The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount dramatic scenes inside multiple black sites around the world through the eyes of those who were there, trace the twisted legal justifications, and chart how enhanced interrogation, a key "weapon" in the global "War on Terror," metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of detainees in multiple locations, some of whom died. Ultimately that war has cost 8 trillion dollars, 900,000 lives, and displaced 38 million people--while the U.S. Senate judged enhanced interrogation was torture and had produced zero high-value intelligence. Yet numerous men, including Abu Zubaydah, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged with any crimes, in contravention of America's ideals of justice and due process, because their trials would reveal the extreme brutality they experienced.Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes.Silenced by a CIA pledge to keep him imprisoned and incommunicado forever, Abu Zubaydah speaks loudly through these pages, prompting the question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what they did to us but because of what we did to them.

This set of 7 volumes, originally published between 1984 and 1998, provides illuminating and practical information on Domestic Abuse. Aimed at both students and practitioners across a range of disciplines, the volumes explore topics including, provision of services for domestic abuse victims, the law, homelessness, advice for those coming into contact with violence and victims of abuse, public policy and the experience of domestic abuse victims themselves.

Bullying is frequently identified as an urgent challenge facing schools today. This title sets out to provide guidelines for school communities on how to: identify bullying in schools; take action to deal with bullying; develop a common approach to deal with bullying; develop positive relationships in the school; promote active learning strategies in the school. Beat bullying is based on the belief that every child and young person has the right to learn in a safe, supportive and respectful environment. The title is divided in two parts? one for teachers and parents, and the other for learners.

Child abuse is a problem we face in all our communities. Over the last few years people have been encouraged to speak out about abuse. Many schools have had to come to grips with dealing with this painful and complicated issue. This title will not turn you into an expert counsellor, but rather provide you with some basic tools to deal with abuse in schools. Educators have a duty to protect children from danger and make sure that schools are safe places for learning. Schools need to create environments for children that are safe and caring. Children are more likely to be open about their troubles in an atmosphere of trust and respect.

The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internetOn May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier's violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called "Slenderman." Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in coverage of the case.Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan's best friend Payton "Bella" Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan's twelfth birthday party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal.Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice.

Sex crime has become one of the most intense areas of public and political concern in recent decades. This book explores the complex influences that shape its construction in the press. Media representations give important clues as to how we should perceive the nature and extent of sex crime, how we should think and feel about it, how we should respond to it, and the measures that might be taken to reduce risk. Understanding the media construction of sex crime is central to understanding its meaning and place in our everyday lives. Unlike much of the existing research, this book explores the construction of sex crime at every stage of the news production process. It then locates the findings within a wider context of cultural, economic and political change in late modernity. The book; shows how increased market competition and tabloidisation has altered fundamentally the way in which news is produced, communicated and consumed discusses representations of the full range of sex crimes from consensual homosexual offences and prostitution to serial rape and sex murder draws upon extensive empirical research in Northern Ireland, while addressing issues relevant to advance capitalist societies across the globe

'Get your daughters to read this, but only after your partners and sons have finished it' Jo Brand 'An astute and persuasive page-turner' Observer _____________________________________________________ Too often, we blame women. For walking home alone at night. For not demanding a seat at the table. For not overcoming the odds that are stacked against them. This distracts us from the real problem: the failings and biases of a society that was not built for women. In this explosive book, feminist writer and activist Laura Bates exposes the systemic prejudice at the heart of five of our key institutions. Education Politics Media Policing Criminal justice Combining stories with shocking evidence, Fix the System, Not the Women is a blazing examination of sexual injustice and a rallying cry for reform. ________________________________________________ 'Powerful' Sunday Times 'I am in awe of Laura Bates . . . her writing is nothing short of perfect' Sofie Hagen, author of Happy Fat 'A blistering manifesto for change' Dr Pragya Agarwal 'Finish the book furious - before rallying for the next fight' Grazia Latest Must-Reads

At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century.How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries-men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state-Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice. The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived-the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time. A foreword is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.

"Things Even Gonzalez Can't Fix" is the shockingly brilliant debut memoir of a 24-year-old Greek South African girl, Christy Chilimigras. It is nothing like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". Although there are old women in black plucking stray hairs from their chins, the nuts in the baklava appear by way of a dash of crack cocaine, a sneaky brand of sexual abuse and cereal Tupperwares, packed to the brim with dagga. It is also very funny.

It is the story of a young girl growing up in Johannesburg in a space of pure chaos, raised by two addict parents. In reality Christy, otherwise known as Mouse, is raised by Tiger, her older sister. Their childhood is strange, made up of crack excursions to Hillbrow on second weekends at 3am, courtesy of their father, and a dope-smoking mother, Old Lass, who raises the two young girls single-handedly while starting her own business. Tiger and Mouse’s worlds are overturned when Old Lass proceeds to marry an alcoholic control freak under an unsuspecting tree, only to get arrested following an invasion by the Hawks.

“Children of addicts are curious things. We are deathly serious. We tinker on the edge of the worst case scenario. We are manic in our joy. We mean to dip our toes, but rather dive head first into extremes. We despise drugs … and people who do drugs. So what then does it say about me when at 16 I fall desperately in love with a boy who perpetually has a joint dangling from his lips?”

"Things Even Gonzalez Can't Fix" is also a disturbingly brutal story about two sisters, raised by a father who has been sexualising them since they were toddlers.

“We are desperate for answers and the knowledge of where to place our discomfort. If it feels like abuse and hurts like abuse, but it doesn’t look like the abuse we read about in magazines, does it even count?”

At 16 Christy falls in love with Olive Oil, a dopehead addict, then, at 22, with a much older sado masochist, The Italian, who introduces her to a world of dangerously rough sex.

“The book is my attempt at reclaiming my sanity and sexuality, which was colonised a long time ago. It involved countless bowls of pasta, glasses of wine (which best you believe I overthought) and a compulsion to be honest; very honest. Like oh sweet Jesus it hurts to spill your guts. It hurts to be this honest.”

A book that simply pulsates with edgy originality, that unleashes a Millennial’s unapologetic perspective of our world, Christy Chilimigras is a new voice that demands to be read. Not since Kopano Matlwa’s "Coconut" has a book promised to shake perspectives and overturn the way we see things.

Annamarie van Niekerk gaan brutaal eerlik om met vraagstukke waarmee ons daagliks worstel: plaasmoord, geweld teen vroue, skuld en onmag, aandadigheid en keuse.

Sy woon in Den Haag, maar keer terug Suid-Afrika toe vir die begrafnis van haar liewe vriend, Ruben, wat saam met sy ma in ʼn wrede plaasmoord vermoor is. Dié reis lei terug na ander reise: Van haar kinderjare in PE in ʼn streng Nasionale huishouding met ʼn Broederbondpa. Na Umtata, waar sy gaan klasgee en verlief raak op ʼn swart kollega. Na Hillbrow, waar die twee van hulle onwettig saamwoon en aktief is in skrywersirkels met vriende soos Nadine Gordimer en Njabulo Ndebele. Tot geweld ook hul verhouding binnedring. Uiteindelik na die tronk, waar sy Ruben se moordenaars gaan soek in haar strewe na verstaan.

Van Niekerk vervleg haar eie storie aangrypend met ’n verkenning van die groot kwessies in ons land. Onder ʼn bloedrooi hemel is ʼn diep ontroerende persoonlike reis, van geweld na genade, meesterlik vertel.

Like all relationships, the ones we have at work are subject to stresses—maybe even fractures. Productivity is lost. Tension mounts. Cooperation is reduced. And the workplace becomes toxic. What’s the solution?

In Making Things Right at Work, Dr. Gary Chapman, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 5 Love Languages®, is joined by business consultants Dr. Jennifer Thomas and Dr. Paul White to offer strategies for restoring harmony at work.

You’ll learn:

• How to discern the causes of workplace conflict
• How to avoid unnecessary disputes
• How to repair relationships when you’ve messed up
• How to let go of past hurts and rebuild trust

Don’t let broken relationships taint your work environment. Take steps to make things right . . . not tomorrow, but today. The success of your career depends on it!

An intimate and powerful rumination on American gun violence by Paul Auster, one of our greatest living writers and "genuine American original" (The Boston Globe), in an unforgettable collaboration with photographer Spencer OstranderLike most American boys of his generation, Paul Auster grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B Westerns. A skilled marksman by the age of ten, he also lived through the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his grandfather by his grandmother when his father was a child and knows, through firsthand experience, how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence.In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America's use and abuse of guns, from the violent displacement of the native population to the forced enslavement of millions, to the bitter divide between embattled gun control and anti-gun control camps that has developed over the past 50 years and the mass shootings that dominate the news today. Since 1968, more than one and a half million Americans have been killed by guns. The numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different--and why are we the most violent country in the Western world?Interwoven with Spencer Ostrander's haunting photographs of the sites of more than thirty mass shootings in all parts of the country, Bloodbath Nation presents a succinct but thorough examination of America at a crossroads, and asks the central, burning question of our moment: What kind of society do we want to live in?A portion of proceeds from this book will be donated to the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit organization working to stop gun death and injury through research, education, and advocacy.

Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals', with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege.

Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles.

Intimacy and injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.

After a century that has been described as the most violent in the history of humanity, Professor Richard Bessel has written an intelligent and fascinating book on the history of our violent world and how we have become obsessed about violence. He critiques the great themes of modern history from revolutionary upheavals around the globe, to the two world wars and the murder of the European Jews, to the great purges and, more recently, terrorism. Violence, it seems, is on everyone's mind. It constantly is in the news; it has given rise to an enormous historical, sociological, and philosophical literature; it occupies a prominent place in popular entertainment; and it is regarded as one of the fundamental problems affecting social, political and interpersonal relations. Bessel sheds light on this phenomenon and how our sensitivity towards violence has grown and has affected the ways in which we understand the world around us - in terms of religious faith, politics, military confrontation, the role of the state, as well as of interpersonal and intimate relations. He critiques our modern day relationship with violence and how despite its continuing and inevitable nature, we have become more committed to limiting and suppressing it. Both historically questioning and intensely evocative of the most vicious and brutal violence enacted by mankind, this book shows how the place of violence in the modern world presents a number of paradoxes and how it is an inescapable theme in human history.