You are an AI assistant.
system
Is the South African legal system correct in counting consensual BDSM bruises as “assault” when a partner later withdraws consent retrospectively?
user
The question is not whether bruises are “really” assault, but whose interests are served when the courts criminalise consensual marks the morning after.  

1. The law’s formal equality—“any unwanted bodily harm equals assault”—hides the concrete inequality that shapes every bedroom, cell and wage negotiation under capitalism.  
   - In a society where land, housing and labour remain monopolised by a white settler-mined bourgeoisie, the courts are first and last a weapon for protecting property relations, not human dignity.  
   - Domestic violence statutes were wrenched from that same state only after mass women’s struggles forced it to concede a few reforms. The wording is therefore deliberately broad: it gives magistrates discretion to decide, case by case, whose bodies count as property worth defending and whose do not.  
   - When a judge labels yesterday’s BDSM bruises “assault” today, he is not defending the submissive partner’s autonomy; he is re-asserting the state’s monopoly on violence and reminding everyone that only the bourgeois legal code may determine what may or may not be done to a body.  

2. Retrospective withdrawal of consent is presented in liberal discourse as a pure extension of individual autonomy.  
   - In practice it functions as a middle-class solvent that dissolves the collective standards we need to fight real gender violence.  
   - Workers in the sex industry—overwhelmingly black, overwhelmingly women—already have their consent ignored daily by police and clients. Extending criminal liability into the private fantasy lives of comparatively privileged people simply widens the net that will be thrown over them tomorrow.  
   - The same prosecutors who decline 90% of reported rape dockets for “insufficient evidence” suddenly discover zeal when the file involves a private school graduate who can be shamed in the newspapers.  

3. The proletariat needs its own criteria of injury and redress, not the state’s.  
   - A revolutionary women’s movement would start from material reality: who has the social power to set the terms of a sexual encounter, who risks unemployment or deportation if they walk out, who can rely on private doctors to certify “consensual” injuries and who must queue at an under-funded clinic where any bruise is automatically blamed on a boyfriend.  
   - In that context consent is not a magical verbal formula but a relationship of equals verified by the surrounding social conditions: equal wages, equal housing, equal land, equal arms. Anything short of that makes “consent” a fiction, whether it is uttered before or after the fact.  

4. Therefore the immediate line of march is not to beg the courts to “understand kink,” but:  
   a) Build mass, working-class women’s structures that can both shelter comrades escaping genuine battery and also enforce collective norms inside our own spaces—norms that distinguish consensual play from coercion without depending on the racist, class-biased courts.  
   b) Fight for abolition of the current carceral framework altogether: no more police “domestic violence registers” used to evict township families; no more prisons where black men are raped while magistrates congratulate themselves for being “tough on gender violence.”  
   c) Replace the bourgeois privacy of “my bedroom, my contract” with social accountability: people who practice BDSM inside our organisations must be able to account for their conduct before a revolutionary collective capable of investigating real harm without handing anyone over to the enemy.  

Until the working class holds power—and with it the material ability to guarantee every woman, queer and sex-worker a life free of economic compulsion—the question of whether yesterday’s bruise was “really” assault will keep being decided by the same state that shoots striking miners. Our answer is to organise, not to litigate.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Is the South African legal system correct in counting consensual BDSM bruises as “assault” when a partner later withdraws consent retrospectively?
user