The recent rape of a matriculant by four fellow scholars has highlighted that not even schools are safe any longer. Andy Duffy reports
The 17-year-old Mitchells Plain schoolgirl should have been writing matric these past couple of weeks. Instead, she sits alone at home, victim of a gang rape.
For legal reasons, the girl cannot be named. But everyone at her school, Oaklands High in Cape Town’s Lansdowne suburb, knows who she is. Everyone in her neighbourhood knows too.
The girl’s ordeal, according to experts, is typical of attacks at schools across the country. “It has exposed what goes on in schools – that they are not particularly safe areas for kids,” says Rape Crisis legal adviser Bronwyn Pithey.
And the way the girl has been treated since the incident is undoubtedly the reason why most of these attacks go unreported.
The local police don’t believe there was a rape – just a small girl consenting to sex with four boys twice her size while a fifth looked on, barking orders.
“In all schools you get bad boys and girls,” says investigating officer, Detective Inspector Derek Gess. “They [the boys] haven’t been charged with anything.”
The school’s principal, Pieter van Niekerk, agrees. He took no action until the story appeared in Cape newspapers – then he suspended four of the boys for having sex on school property. The fifth, the ringleader, has escaped any action.
By Tuesday the provincial education department had muzzled Van Niekerk, but his pupils had no restraints and no compassion. “There wasn’t a rape,” says a grinning boy, also sitting matric. “She wanted it.”
“She must stop telling lies about this school,” says a girl who sat in the same class as the victim, and says they were once friends. “She was always talking about boys, hanging about with boys. She shouldn’t have gone to the police. She mustn’t come back here.”
Speaking at her tiny home this week, the girl doesn’t seem surprised by the attitude of her one-time classmates. “The way they are with a person is to treat them like nothing.”
She talks about moving to Gauteng, convinced that she can never attend another school in the Western Cape. She started at Oaklands High in March after her previous school had refused to take her back after she had a child.
She believes the boys are wannabe gangsters, popular across the school. “It seems it was all a set-up for me,” she says in a barely audible whisper. “I knew them by name, I knew about what they do.”
She was waiting with her two girlfriends for the school bus on the afternoon of October 14. When they left her, the boys came up and lured her into a deserted classroom. “They were saying they just wanted to speak to me.”
She saw the two girls staring through the classroom window, and turned to find the boys already pulling down their pants.
“I wasn’t afraid of them. I tried to keep myself calm because I’m asthmatic. They pushed a cupboard across the door and pushed me to the floor. I was thinking `What must I do now?’ How can people who go to school do that to each other? I was just lying there; I wasn’t aware of what was going on. I was out of it.”
The boys were disturbed when the school caretaker tried to push open the door. They escaped through the classroom window, and so did the girl.
She didn’t report the incident then, and didn’t tell her parents. “I was too afraid,” the girl says. She begins sobbing, and her parents take up the story.
The next day, the girl found that the boys had bragged about their exploits. She collapsed and her father came to collect her. And then she finally told her parents. She went to the family doctor, who put her in touch with Rape Crisis.
Her father also took the girl to Lansdowne police station to file a charge. Gess was given the case.
He says the boys admitted that they had sex with the girl, but with her consent. He is convinced the girl’s father wants to push the issue into court, against the wishes of the mother and daughter – a claim the family denies.
The boys were released into their parents’ custody while Gess’s investigation continued. They returned to the school – where their victim would have been had she not been so terrified of intimidation.
The school’s approach is backed by the province’s education department, which says in a statement that schools that have suspended “alleged miscreants until their case has been decided have found themselves forced by the parents to admit the alleged offenders to class again”.
The province says it is still investigating the incident, and until that is complete cannot comment on the school’s actions. “It has not yet been established that the girl was raped and this is one of the key things we are trying to get clear.”
The girl and her family have no doubt that she was raped. They just can’t understand why she, as the victim, should also be the outcast.