Post-pandemic women-led vigilantism: implications for gender, power and popular justice in the rural Eastern Cape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores women-led vigilantism in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape province following the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on long-term ethnography, we argue that women vigilantes perceive violent discipline as a necessary response to community leaders’ and police failure to punish crimes that primarily impact single women. We argue firstly that this women-led vigilantism may be seen not only as a manifestation of popular justice, but also as a form of popular gender justice, taking its form in relation to manifestations of patriarchal violence and vulnerability to which it responds. We also connect women-led vigilantism to a rise in illicit hard drug use among young, marginalised men, highlighting how vigilantism relies on and sustains constructions of “the criminal.” Finally, despite belief among these women that their vigilantism is winning them security and respect, we question whether their actions effectively address the patriarchal power relations that shape women’s vulnerability given their focus on punishing young, drug-dependent men who have little social power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".