REASONS FOR UNREPORTED RAPE

A study was conducted on seventy victims of unreported rape during the research period between December 1974 and August 1976 in Brisbane, Australia. The study was aimed at explaining why many women did not report sexual assault to the police. Wilson divided the reasons for not reporting rape into five categories: The Victim and the Police, The Victim and Society, The Victim and Relatives, The Victim and Herself, and The Victim and other People.

Under the first category, some seven percent of the victims interviewed anticipated hostility from police. For example, some said that they “knew about the hassles women have with police and courts and couldn’t face it”. Most of those interviewed revealed that they did not report the incident either because too little evidence was available to investigate the allegation or because they thought that the police would not believe them. Only two women feared that court procedures would treat victims as offenders. For example, one said, “Just because I had sex with him in the past will kill my case. They ask you about that in court” . A major reason for women from this sample was that they expected antagonistic responses from society at large. They said that they had “already suffered a traumatic experience with the attack and they are not prepared to live through a further period of stigmatization and labeling from an unsympathetic society”. Another major reason was that of specific fears relating to the reactions of relatives (husbands, parents and sometimes brothers). The following comment depicts a woman’s fear that her husband would not believe her and see her as “spoiled property”: “My husband would hate me. He’s big on faithfulness and he’d hate me” . According to Wilson, this shows that many husbands assume that “his property (the wife) contributed towards the violation”. Many girls who had been raped at parties feared reprisal from their parents because they thought their parents would blame them.

Similarly, those who were raped by a family member feared that their parents would not believe them. One girl had this to say, “My mother was afraid of him [the father] and she would never take my side. But dad did do it.” A recent study conducted by Rapcan in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, found that three out of five mothers know that their child is being sexually abused by a relative and do not intervene (2007).

Often overlooked, are reasons that deal with the victim and herself. In this study, almost one in every five victims said that they did not report the incident because they simply wanted to forget about the whole event. However, Wilson argues that from experience and other available evidence, victims of other crimes of violence rarely use the “I want to forget” reason for not reporting. Thus, although women from the sample did not explain “wanting to forget,” Wilson states that it comes back to the social stereotypes surrounding rape and in particular, avoidance of internalizing them.

Lastly, under victims and other people, roughly fifty percent of the sample said that they had told someone (usually a close friend) within a day of the attack. The other half had either reported the event for the first time during this study, or some weeks or months after the incident in conjunction with another topic of conservation. For example, two of the victims told a counsellor when arranging an abortion resulting from the rape, one told a lawyer-friend when seeking legal advice and another told her doctor when she suffered from abdominal pain after the offence. The research also revealed that most women saw their own doctors rather than going to public hospitals and that they deliberately discussed the rape with another woman initially – “a not unexpected result given their recent experience with a male” adds Wilson.

3 YEARS OLD - AVERAGE RAPE VICTIM IN SA

When you think of a 3-year old toddler, you think of bottles, dummies, just out of nappies, trotting around finding everything in the world new and exciting. But not in South Africa. In South Africa, the reality for these babies is that their childhoods are being brutally snatched away from them every day. Every day in this country that the government does nothing, rapists attack children and their lives change forever. Some may never be able to urinate or defecate properly again after their internal organs have been ripped apart. Babies are getting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases before their lives have even begun.

You would think that years ago, when these statistics first shocked South Africans and nations around the world, that the government would have leaped into action and taken on board all the comments and suggestions made by medical research councils or international aid agencies. But instead, the opposite has occurred. Recommendations have been ignored, specialist police task teams disbanded and in every sense of the word victims who have been raped by one or many attackers, are raped again by the system that is supposed to protect them. There are the stories in the newspapers and then - who cares what happens later? Who follows up the story in court? Does the case even get to court? Who sees whether that child is able to grow and live, or whether the mother or grandmother can overcome her grief at the abuse of her child?

When Interpol states that South Africa has the highest rate of rapes in the world you might think that country was at war - savaged by a foreign army. But the war on children in this country is being waged by individuals or gangs of men who have felt empowered by lax government structures to do what they like with impunity.

It is not the criminals who are being punished in this country, it is the victims. Victims of rape are so badly treated that researchers from the Medical Research Council in Gauteng had to go for counselling themselves after what they had seen.

40 per cent of rape victims in South Africa are at risk of becoming HIV-positive if they do not receive post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). Yet not even this treatment is effectively provided for victims.

Aside from the inhumanity in not providing basic medication for victims, it is actually more cost effective for government to provide PEP than to treat HIV. Rape specialist, Dr Adrienne Wulfsohn, says the hospital costs of treating one rape survivor who contracts HIV is around R600 000 during her shortened life.

It is a shocking inditement of a country that 50 per cent of all court cases are for rape, according to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) except in Durban and Mdantsane, where it is 60 per cent.

And 75 per cent of rape in South Africa is gang rape.

Teenagers (girls and boys) who are supposed to be thinking of love as something romantic and idealistic also have their dreams shattered since 28 to 30 per cent report that their first sexual encounter was forced. Unfortunately there are many South African men who will just say the victim enjoyed it or asked for it.

International agencies like UNAids report that in South Africa two-and-a-half times more women are infected than men because many women experience forced sex.

Unicef reports that six times more girls than boys in Africa are infected with HIV. Children are infected with HIV whose mothers are not HIV-positive - so they could only have contracted the disease from rape.

Organisations who support rape victims in South Africa have been concerned for many years that the system has been giving criminals every advantage while victims do not see justice done.

Where is the future for children in this country? Too many government officials talk about cracking down on crime - and then turn around and say they want to legalise prostitution. All the statistics show that rape is not being effectively handled as a crime in South Africa. The country needs specialized police units to deal with rape and specialized care centres in hospitals to treat victims. But South Africa needed these years ago.

Right now, thousands of children are paying - with their lives - every day for the government's inability or unwillingness to protect them from violent crime.

Yours sincerely

INGELA RICHARDSON

SICKENING STEINBERG

The Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London, South Africa, ran the most sickening "article" by Jonny Steinberg regarding sex and South African politics on Saturday 23 May. Steinberg is conveniently situated in New York - far away from the reality that women in South Africa have to face on a daily basis.

Steinberg's essay is completely degrading to women. There is a viewpoint among certain men that sex is their prerogative - sex on demand with whomever, wherever. The fact that this is called "rape" by the women and children who suffer the forced attention, is brushed off, ignored, disregarded. Women are still seen as chattels to be used and thrown away. This is the core of the South African issue.

Lisa Vetten, of the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, said that at the ANC’s general meeting at Polokwane in 2007, there was no discussion on violence against women. Worse still, the Department of Justice declared a moratorium on the roll-out of sexual offences courts. Specialist units of the South African Police Service, including the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Units, have been disbanded and integrated into general police stations. Highly trained people are expected to deal with more general as well as specialist cases - without vehicles, cell phones and specialist support structures.

It is no wonder then that South Africa has the highest statistics for child rape in the world - and this includes countries at war. There is no "pleasuring of women" involved. This is simple brutality and aggression - the same kind of brutality that is usually only seen in wars of genocide. And these are only the statistics that are reported. The last research done on this issue - In 1997 by the Medical Research Council research - showed that only one in nine women reported rape to the police.

South Africans may remember the first articles about the rape of babies, that sickened surgeons who had to literally try to mend the pieces of the child.

Since then, the overwhelming number of documentaries, articles and research done on the issue of rape in South Africa must have totally flown over Steinberg's head. Or perhaps that is the reason he is living in New York now?

There is no respect for the elderly - as grandmothers are raped - and no mercy for the children - who have been savaged by rape.

More than anything, this is why "sex and politics" have become such an issue in this country. "Womanising" may be glamorized by certain men, but it is certainly not glamorous for women in the middle of an Aids crisis.

Young women in this country may have been hoping for a newer, more progressive face in politics, that sees them, not merely as "window dressing" or puppets of the men who rule, but as being empowered to ensure the safety of their sisters and children.

It is surely a simple enough request that children be able to walk home from school unmolested and women return home from work without threat of attack. Why is this a continual problem in South Africa? There should be more specialized child care units and government funded daycare centres, so that women can go to work without fear that little ones left at home will be brutalized.

A journalist researching the horrors of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - where the worst affected have been the poorest women labourers - asked some of the gangs of armed men why they did this. It was not for food and it was not for money - one impoverished labourer offered them his last savings if they would not attack his wife. He was murdered and she was raped. The gangs said that if they had a need, as men, they should be able to take and use whoever was there.

Women and children in South Africa have been treated in this same "use and throw away" manner. The result is that those who are able to afford it are on medication in private clinics. Those who cannot - and they are the majority - suffer, mourn, despair and contract HIV or Aids. As Vetten stated, sexual violence does not just affect the victim but the whole community. When abuse is not seen as a crime, rape becomes a way of life and there is no control over human behaviour.

People like Steinberg only provide a justification for men who see rape as a sexual act - as opposed to an act of aggression and violence. As Vetten points out, the Jacob Zuma rape trial sent out a very negative message about how women in rape cases are treated by the courts. The woman in this case was publicly humiliated and beaten down by the defense team. What is the point of politicians putting on a show with "16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women" if there is no effective change?

Women in South Africa should be able to date and flirt and be as "sexy" as women in other parts of the world. But they are not allowed to. Young women wearing mini-skirts at a taxi rank in South Africa had their skirts ripped off and they were raped. Too many judges have talked about mitigating factors in rape cases being issues of clothing and whether girls were old enough to have consented (this in the case of a ten-year old!)

If a country is judged by the security of its most vulnerable citizen - a child - then South Africa is condemned by the sheer numbers of its victims. But worse than those who attack and brutalize are those who sit in ivory towers and attempt vindication with sloppy irony and extremely poor metaphors.

Yours sincerely

INGELA RICHARDSON

SHATTERED CHILDHOOD

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