What's at stake in the Reeva Steenkamp murder trial?

Tonight's discussion, led by Sarah, of Anthony Atlbeker's reading of two major cases involving murdered women in South Africa, a reading that drew upon recent accounts of the rapes, torture and deaths of women around us, was gripping.

Anthony Altbeker drew a picture of a criminal justice system that is supposed to have shifted from confession-based evidence (with all its flaws and past history of SA police torture), to one based on forensic data. The woeful, perhaps systemic, gaps, impossibilities, blatant falsification and fabrication involved in the high profile 'evidence' led cases he has followed, and the broader implications for our society, formed a particularly interesting aspect of his talk and responses.

Class and access issues --  in relation to women and murder cases were parsed in the discussion. The 'black man as proxy' was deeply analysed as a decoy strategy in the case of Pistorius, but also the long duree of the appalling and sloppy cop and prosecutorial work:- the Lotz trial we heard was promulgated by a group of people trained and shaped in the pre 1994 era, giving the lie to recent slipped standards and related discourses.

Sarah raised many questions about power, masculine desire, sex and violence, and the brutalisation of women's bodies in South Africa, and many in the audience pressed Altbeker for his deep thinking on symbols, linkages and patterns. We were most sombre when considering how sexual gratification and arousal can proceed in the context of torture and death.

There was a crowd of over 50 people, and some new visitors from the School of Public Health as well as a cross section of people from the arts, from literature, psychology, the social sciences and the media world. The audience raised many challenging issues, from the place of Gun Control in SA, to the long term impact of specific institutions in our identity formation (certain kinds of schools and sporting cultures, army life, prisons etc), to the militarisation of our society, to international and local 'frames' and comparisons, to the specificity of our legal and forensic system, to the gap between the Pistorius and the Steenkamp family.

The expectation is, from Atlbeker's experience, that Pistorius' trial will be postponed. It was absorbing to hear Altbeker set out the varieties and constraints around charge forms, and conviction possibilities, for a case like this.  Technical specificities of Reeva Steenkamp's death (where she was, how she died, who she was before death and how re made after death, and the ghoulish spectacle of her model-shot images juxtaposed with narratives of her shocking and violent death), occupied some time. In analysing media, political and community reactions to her death Anthony Altbeker and Sarah asked: did these form around age and gender nodes as much as or more than race and class? The notion of safety and public security was laid bare.

This sombre evening ended with many more minutes of quiet talking over some drinks as people pondered this aspect of our mood, our current Zeitgeist.