SA law needs an overhaul to protect rape survivors →

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This is obviously a deeply entrenched social problem, rooted in long-held patriarchal notions of male ownership over women’s bodies. The law alone cannot solve it. But the law can, and should, do a lot to validate and vindicate the rights of women (and men and genderqueer people) who are subjected to sexual violations. Instead, what the law in SA does is validate the offender’s subjective sense of entitlement to someone else’s body.

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Remorseless Pistorius didn't deserve judge's mercy →

As we waited for Oscar Pistorius to be freed from prison on parole last week, many among us felt that he had not served enough time for the senseless killing of Reeva Steenkamp. It is difficult to articulate this subtle unease - an intuitive sense that there has been a mistake, a mismatch between crime and punishment. Yet this sense seems to be so widely shared (including, it seems, by the minister of justice, who suspended the parole approval at the eleventh hour) that it can hardly be dismissed as primitive vengeance.

And it isn’t.

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