According to a recent study, the rape homicide rate in Cape Town is 12 times higher than in the United States. Charlene Smith reports
In the photograph is a beautiful young woman sitting with her boyfriend. It is a 21st-birthday photograph. Six years before she was raped so violently with a sharp object in her anus that she will never have children.
The boy’s mother says: “He has known and loved her since she was 16, it has been very difficult because she had terrible mood swings. She became fearful and withdrawn when the rapist came up for a parole hearing – and fine once it was denied.
“My son has said to me, `Mom, it doesn’t matter if we can’t have children, you can have grandchildren from your other children.'”
Her face shines with certainty as she looks at the picture. “You see, there can be healing after rape.”
The young woman was lucky to live; many children and women who are raped do not.
The Cape High Court recently imposed a life sentence on a man who raped a four-year-old child, then set her body alight to try and destroy evidence of what he had done.
In a ground-breaking study into rape in Johannesburg in 1992 and rape homicide in Cape Town from mid-1996 to late 1998, University of Cape Town forensic pathologist Dr Lorna Martin found that violence taking place during rape is worsening.
In one instance, a 35-year-old woman died after being raped and assaulted with concrete slabs. Broken bottles were inserted in her vagina and an avocado pip was found in her rectum.
Martin has called for a national strategy to combat rape and provide appropriate care for rape survivors and their families.
She says district surgeons often give incomplete reports because they do not want to testify in court -which means the case is often lost. Police officers usually ignore district surgeons who point out similarities in rapes which would point to serial rape.
Because officials do not want extra work, South Africa has the highest incidence of rape and the most brutal sexual violence in the world.
Martin called for a national rape protocol to be implemented – a guideline for the medical care of all rape survivors. The South African Medical and Dental Association also recently called for such a protocol.
Martin, a pioneering rape activist, has examined more than 2 000 rape survivors and performed autopsies on 59 women raped and murdered in Cape Town.
The Western Cape has one-and-a-half times more rapes than the national average, according to Martin, and 40 times more rapes than the average European city, “and that is only the reported cases”.
She says police must call pathologists to scenes where women are murdered, “where any doubt exists as to the nature of the crime” because in many instances rape goes undetected.
Her study found:
l Rape is seasonal (women are more likely to get raped in warm weather) and occurs mainly against young African women by strangers.
l In Cape Town, most women raped and murdered were coloured women aged between 26 and 45 years, of whom 18,6% were raped by a previous or existing partner. They were most often strangled.
l Of rape homicide victims, 98,3% had non- genital injury, and 55,9% had evidence of genital injury.
In four of the 59 murders, attackers had ripped open the women’s vaginas with knives.
In one case a 23cm piece of black conduit pipe “had been forced into the vagina and perforated into the abdomen”. Other weapons included chair legs, a torch, a baton and tree branches.
The majority of sex offenders, Martin says, are not mentally ill. “In a study of a group of male offenders for psychiatric evaluation by the courts, only six suggested an organic mental disorder. The most common diagnosis was schizophrenia and none were charged with murder.”
In many rapes it is difficult to detect genital injuries. In the United States dyes and coloposcopes pick up injuries in more than 87% of cases, compared to as low as 10% in cases where this equipment is not used, including South Africa.
Martin expresses concern at the rapidly rising rape statistics in South Africa, from 15 342 in 1983 to 52 160 in 1997, and notes that in 1994, police estimated that the 32 107 rapes perpetrated in that year were only 2,8% of the actual incidence of rape.
Perhaps the best incentive to rape is a policing system that fails the victims. In 27% of the cases Martin examined, the assailants were unknown. Of the 73% known to the police, 41% were arrested and 32% were charged. A quarter were still awaiting trial at the end of the two-year study, cases were withdrawn in 3,4% of cases and only 10% were succesfully prosecuted, with one assailant getting a life sentence, another 30 years, one 12 years, two 10 years and one seven years.
And yet in Gauteng alone, every six days a woman is murdered by her male partner. And the average rapist is either happily married or has a steady girlfriend.
Martin began her research quite by accident. In 1991 as a newly graduated doctor she found employment as a district surgeon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. In those days there was a daily rape clinic at 2pm at the Johannesburg mortuary, where for two hours raped women would crowd together on benches for medical examinations – none could bathe before the examination.
She soon realised that the police kept no statistics on rape homicides. Martin found that although less than 2% of rapes in Cape Town end in murder, the rape homicide rate in the mother city was 12 times higher than in the US.
But she believes too, that because no official statistics are kept on rape homicide, the crime is underreported.
Most women (73%) died in or close to their homes, the rest were killed in a nearby suburb (17%) or at a distance from their homes (3%).
Most women were attacked either in their home (31%), while walking in the street (20%) or after leaving a shebeen or bar (17%). They were also most likely to be stabbed to death (41% of cases).
In a similar study from Dade County, Miami, 54% of victims were murdered in their homes (and on average were aged 41 years old – an identical age to women killed in their homes in South Africa), while those found elsewhere were aged around 31 years old (29 years old in South Africa).
Most rapes were committed on women travelling to and from work, with abduction common. Some women were held for days as “sex slaves”.
Most rapes were under threat of physical harm and many at gunpoint. Girls under 16 were more likely to be raped by people known to them – while 80% of all rapes were perpetrated by strangers.
In Johannesburg a black woman is almost five times more likely to be raped than her white counterpart.
In Cape Town 60% of those murdered during rape were stabbed, while 22% suffered blunt injuries – including having paving stones dropped on their heads.
Of those stabbed 14% had more than 10 stab wounds, but the prevalence of guns has seen women being murdered with firearms rising from 18% in 1986 to 41,5% in 1998.
“Medical evidence in rape cases is critical because there are usually no witnesses to crimes of sexual violence and the medical expert provides the only corroborating evidence,” Martin says.
In 1996 a district surgeon wrote in the South African Medical Journal that because only 10% of women had any medical evidence to support their claims of rape, women who lay charges of rape which are unfounded – because of scant medical evidence – should be prosecuted.
Martin’s research shows that false rape reporting is extremely rare, and that a lack of adequate forensic equipment, and inexperienced and lazy doctors, are more likely to lead to a lack of corroborative medical evidence.