The “public intellectual” has a specific role in society – to publicly raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot be co-opted by governments, someone whose
raison d’être is to represent people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.
This definition of the public intellectual – from Palestinian cultural critic and literary scholar Edward Said – is the foundation of a book we have just completed, titled
The Fabric of Dissent: Public Intellectuals in South Africa, published by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press.
Our editorial team from the University of Pretoria’s faculty of humanities and the HSRC put together 75 portraits of public intellectuals who personify Said’s definition and who have profoundly influenced South African society in the past and present.
The report further states that, domestic violence occurs in all population subgroups. In many countries, including Kenya, women are often socialized into tolerating and rationalizing a key component of domestic violence, like abuse by husbands and to remain silent about it whenever it occurs.
Violence against women come in four different forms: physical, sexual, psychological and economic. Even though psychological abuse may not be easily recognized, it is the most common form of abuse against women.
In many setups, psychological or emotional abuse, the most common form of violence against women, often goes unnoticed by the victim, or rather not socially considered as abuse. Emotional abuse comes in subtle forms of insults, humiliation, belittling, threats against your life and many more. Emotional violence, constitutes one in three of all GBV cases recorded.