This work interrogates male attitudes towards women and children with the aim of understanding abuse and sexual violence in South Africa.

Contributing to abusive actions are underlying socially-constructed attitudes of contempt towards females as well as a commonly-held sense that females are there for the use of males, as property or commodity. These factors are aggravated by a wide-spread lack of self-esteem seen in many boys and men, creating in them a need to display power to themselves and their peers.

The art-work “Continuum” is 1120cm long and 23.5cm wide. It is made up of 70 individual photographs of South African men plus super-imposed comments derived from research. It follows the continuum of male attitudes from mild chauvinism and sexual jokes to verbal abuse, physical abuse, rape and femicide.

The work is very powerful in its ability to raise questions, to confront prejudices and to challenge the viewer’s presumptions. It is a useful and innovative tool for the facilitation of debate on gender relations and masculine identity.

It has been shown at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the NSA Gallery in Durban, the Women’s Day Festival at MuseumAfrica and the Nico Malan Theatre in Cape Town.

Apartheid had damaged all of us. It had emasculated many South African men. It had undermined and belittled their dignity, and created insecure egos.

This, plus a high level of unemployment, contempt and fear of women, and a new emphasis on the equal rights of women, all linked to produce a fragile male identity in South African men.