Page 74 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

Young mothers and their babies at a public awareness session on basic antenatal care given
at the Bishop Lavis community hall by the Maternal and Infant Health Care Strategies
Research Unit, October 2008.

part, the in-house Gender and Health Research Group (which had started out in 1995
as the Women’s Health Group within the Centre for Epidemiological Research in
South Africa (CERSA) and which had been upgraded to a full research group in 2004)
expanded its initial focus on rape to include sexual assault, femicide and gender-based
violence (GBV) too by 2012. In the course of this, it moved from just recognizing
and defining these crimes to quantifying and trying to account for them, identifying
risk factors and developing sensitive treatment protocols. No instant solutions were
anticipated, however – as one of its researchers sombrely observed, ‘Violence is part of
our country’s history’ – but the unit did make a start by formulating a clear definition
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of GBV, which was later accepted by the WHO, and by contributing to new South

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