Ferial Haffajee
A Second Look
It is Charlene Smith’s pen that will ensure she is no victim. A rape survivor, her brave and searing account of this most personal and violent violation is a wake-up call. It takes many thousands of words to capture the smell of her fear, the fear of death and the violation of her body last Thursday night.
Every rape victim or survivor should have her story smeared across the nation’s conscience in this way. Instead, it is often only the really horrifying rapes (as if you can assign levels of horror to this heinous crime) that make it on to television screens and into newspaper columns in the most sanitised versions of police-speak possible.
Witness The Star on Monday. “Two 22-year-old women were gang-raped by about 30 men on Friday night. The two women were forced at gunpoint to accompany the men to a deserted area near 11th Avenue, where the men split into two groups of 15 men and then raped the women.”
That’s all. No fear. No horror. No loathing. No emergency when what we need is a state of emergency.
More women were raped than people injured this Easter weekend – you’d never know! Why? Inured, perhaps? But how?
We are a nation – or half a nation – under siege from within and by the other half. An estimated one in two South African women will be raped in her lifetime, most commonly by somebody she knows and often in her own home.
The National Institute for Crime and the Rehabilitation of Offenders estimates that every 83 seconds a woman is raped somewhere in this country. The police say a woman is raped every 36 seconds.
Statistics are broken into bite-sized chunks by lobbyists to get the nation’s motor running. To inspire anger, to win better resources, to get hackles raised in a country with a history of activism, community censure and a moral sense.
Where are these qualities in the face of a scourge which places us at number six on the world list of pariah states – some of them with higher rape-reporting rates than ours – for the way in which we treat our women?
In 1994, we ranked behind Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Rwanda and Swaziland in the world list of countries which notched up the highest incidence of sexual violence. The only global lists we worry about are international investment rankings.
But, by God, how low can we go? Much lower, it appears.
Lisa Vetten of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation says that the statistics are probably higher than we think.
Since 1982, the incidence of rape has been growing. In 1997 (the last year for which statistics are available), 52 160 women reported to the police that they had been raped.
The police believe that only one in 35 rapes is reported while other organisations say reporting rates are slightly higher at between one in 10 and one in 20.
Johannesburg’s southern council, together with CIET-Africa, last year commissioned a study which found that three in 10 of the 3 700 women interviewed had been victim of a severe form of sexual violence.
The study mapped rape and found that, if compared to a week in time, rape statistics are broken down as follows: “Two full days are taken by rape in the home by a relative – most frequently a father, stepfather or uncle. The next two days are rapes at the hands of acquaintances like a neighbour or date. Three days of the week would be taken up by strangers. And the last hour-and-a- half are gang rapes.”
The study also found rape conviction rates are 1%. Conviction rates for other crimes are closer to 8%.
Why are husbands, fathers, sons and brothers still turning against their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters? Society is changing slowly and joblessness is growing. South Africa has become more violent and it has a young population with growing numbers of young men under 35 years old.
“Men of all races reassert their power and masculinity within the last social arena in which they traditionally hold sway – over women and children in the family and the home,” the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation said in the recent article.
The CIET-Africa survey is the most contemporary research work on rape and it found that of those women who did report rape, more of them (58%) reported rape to the police, while others went to other state institutions, like clinics and hospitals. This indicates greater faith by women in the state.
But when asked about solutions to rape, almost the same number of women advocated working with the police as did those who believed that it is time to take the law into their own hands.
Personally, that’s a solution I favour. Hunt them down. Tar and feather them and then publicly shame them everywhere from Alexandra’s fields to Hillbrow’s parks and in suburban malls.
But what do the experts think?
“People are still not angry enough about what is happening to women,” says the director of People Opposing Women Abuse, Nthabiseng Mogale.
State interventions to improve the criminal justice system have been “fragile”, she argues. We need more visible policing, better-trained magistrates and better counselling.
Vetten says South Africa needs an emergency national response. The solution is multidimensional and embraces everything from better policing, better treatment of survivors, education in the home and at school to teach young boys that rape is wrong.
As Mogale notes and Charlene Smith knows: “Rape is not only an emotional death penalty. With Aids, it is now a physical death penalty.”