A mother grieves as she talks about her little girl who cries and soils herself every day. The child has been raped and sodomized and now she cannot even go to the toilet - the muscles of the child's body were torn apart.
These stories are reported in the newspaper every day - "toddler raped", "baby raped" "teenager gang-raped on her way home from school", but after the story is printed, what happens next?
The victims' lives are destroyed. Physically, children's bodies will never be the same no matter how skillfully surgeons try to repair them. They are infected with HIV and Aids. They are unable to process the extreme emotional trauma - and for the poorest of the poor, there is no counselling, no therapy, no hope that anything will ever improve for them again.
Childhood is shattered - a thing of the past - and broken-hearted mothers and grannies do not even begin to know how to put a plaster on these kinds of wounds.
The overwhelming number of these crimes and the extreme violence directed at women, children and the elderly - are usually only seen in countries at war. And then only if invading soldiers have been instructed to conduct a campaign of genocide against all civilians.
There can be no other nation in the world where the rape of women, children and the elderly has become so condoned as it is in South Africa. Victims seem to be regarded as lesser citizens - unimportant due to their sex or age - used and thrown away like trash.
A front page report in the Daily Dispatch stated that a schoolgirl had been gangraped, possibly outside school premises. The police had arrested the teenagers at school. Yet a member of staff commented that the victim "seemed to be fine". This is what is truly shocking in South Africa. That the most heinous acts can be committed in our communities and ordinary people, perhaps even educated people, do not express their outrage or disbelief.
Who knows what is going on inside the child's head and heart? Who knows how she has been hurt and how she will recover? Teenagers are still children - under the care of the school that should stand "in loco parentis". Yet children are victims when they are raped and they are victims when perpetrators get away with it.
If any one of these child rape cases appeared in a UK newspaper - the story would run for weeks and be the subject of talkshows and investigations into how such things should be prevented and never be allowed to happen again. Whole communities would be outraged.
But in South Africa these horrendous stories are reported every day on almost every page of the newspaper and South Africans seem to have become totally desensitised. People make up excuses and justifications - it was because the child was not adquately cared for, it was because the girl was walking home by herself, it was because...what? How do people explain the rape of grandmothers and babies?
Years ago, United Nations representatives attempted to investigate this situation in South Africa and make recommendations. They found that far from being assisted in this task, they were often hindered by officials. These crimes have only escalated.
In the Gonubie library, a wanted notice was posted yesterday, of a man who allegedly raped a six year old girl for two days and escaped from the police. We need to get him, the poster says, before he attacks another little girl.
Is this what it has come down to? Government has done nothing to stop this war, waged by men who use rape as a weapon to humiliate, degrade and kill women and children. So communities feel they have to do something?
Because while they think about it, grandmothers all over this nation, are trying to pick up the pieces of their babies, and cry how will they survive, living like this?
Yours sincerely
INGELA RICHARDSON
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