Rapist turned activist

At the age of 15, Dumisani Rebombo raped a young girl. Branded a sissy in his South African village because he didn’t herd cattle or have a girlfriend, he was taunted by his friends and ultimately “forced” to prove his masculinity. And the way to establish his manhood was to desecrate womanhood.

Fast-forward 20 years to the present. Rebombo is now a women’s rights activist with the Sonke Gender Justice Network based near Durban, South Africa. In a recent interview with CNN, Rebombo acknowledged the dark past that led him to where he is today, as the national manager of a program promoting the healthy treatment of women, called “One Man Can.”

The program’s provocative name speaks to the power of what one man can do and, equally, the power of what one doesn’t do. In the years following the incident, Rebombo says he never thought of what the girl must have felt and, because she didn’t report it, he was never forced to face his guilt. Yet, in a country where a woman is raped every 26 seconds, Rebombo said, “When the environment accepts that behavior as a norm, you don’t pay much attention to it.”

It wasn’t until he started working for a gender equality organization where part of his job was speaking to victims of rape that he thought about the girl he himself had victimized. He gradually began to understand the traumatic effects of sexual violence and came to the realization that he needed to make things right. He knew he needed to find her.

His first thought was to consult his pastor, who provided him with advice—telling him not to worry about it—that “boys will be boys.”

He ignored this counsel and decided he had to find her and ask for forgiveness. And he did. For the first time, he was confronted with the anguish he had caused her and how she’d had nightmares of that day.

She told him she sometimes still cringes when her husband touches her. But the culminating moment was when she turned to him and said, “Please teach your son not to do what you did to me.”

She didn’t say “protect your daughter” or “teach your sisters and wife how to act so they are safe.” She asked a man to teach his son how to treat a woman. And, as simple a request as this was, it would be revolutionary if it was a reality.

It could be so easy to listen to this story, shake our heads and breathe a self-congratulatory, “Thank goodness we don’t live in a society like that.” No one we know would suggest that violence against women is just boys being boys.

But we’d be kidding ourselves.

A survey by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that one in four American women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime. And an estimated 1.3 million women in the U.S. are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year, according to the CDC and National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

As influential as the women’s movement continues to be in this country and across the globe, it has, for the most part, remained devoid of a significant male presence. And, as progressive as we think we are, it seems that unless both men and women are able to identify the crippling result of the patriarchal society we live in, we will continue to perpetuate the cycle.

In her book, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, author bell hooks said, “The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared than to be loved.”

In small, everyday ways, this myth is confirmed, and both women and men are stuck in the violence of this message. Boys are raised to believe that to be a man is to have no weakness and to be feared, which means that it is through violence they can assert masculinity. And this is literally killing us.

Those who measure up to this standard are celebrated, and those who don’t are stripped of the title “man.” Thus their violence against women begins with violence against themselves. And, as Rebombo’s story reveals, it is supported by the violence of society. And there is no country or culture where this does not exist.

Even as Rebombo stood before his victim and asked for forgiveness, there was a glimmer of hope out of the darkest of nightmares. There was nothing heroic about what he did. It was less than the least he could do. He had ruined her life and there was no way to make amends for that. But the fact that he chose to face his past by investing in the future and working for the rights of women in his country is evidence of the possibility of change.

Unless men are willing to join together with women in acknowledging the war that our culture wages through the worship of power structures and fear, there will never be systemic change.

It cannot just be a women’s movement. And when a woman pleads for a man to teach his son a different way of life than his, what she is really asking is for him to pass on values of equality and respect. What she’s really asking is for men to see that patriarchy is as harmful to men’s souls as it is to women’s and that it is infinitely better to be loved than feared.