Charlene Smith
Five weeks ago a 13-year-old Johannesburg schoolgirl was raped by two classmates aged 13 and 14. One is the grandson of one of South Africa’s pre-eminent political leaders.
They are at school and she is not.
She is too terrified to return to the small eight-pupil class at the private school she attended with the two boys. The school has taken no action against the boys and her mother travels to the school to fetch class notes for her child, who spends most of her time curled up on a couch at home.
“I was a very happy person,” she says, her arms wrapped around her knees, “but no matter how hard I try I can’t be as happy as I was. I’ll never trust any boy again.”
The girl comes from a close-knit, humble, working-class family. She is the youngest child, the beloved star of the family, a child who gets straight A’s. “She is our love child,” her mother says, gently stroking her child’s hair.
The two boys come from prestigious and wealthy broken homes; one is fetched from school daily by a chauffeur.
Because the children are under age they cannot be identified by their real names.
On September 3, the girl’s mother was working in the school tuckshop – which she has done to supplement her family’s meagre income since the child’s father took ill a year ago with a serious heart complaint and had to be laid off work.
The daughter came to her mother and asked if she could go to a party at the home of one of the two boys.
Her mother sits erect on a sofa in the family living room, flanked by the porcelain dolls and ornaments she makes to supplement the family income. “I feel like it was my fault, I was busy packing up at the tuckshop. When she asked to go to the party, I first said no. She said, ‘Come on mom,’ and mentioned that the boys had said another girl in their class would also be there. Another person helping me said, let her go, the boys come from good families.
“I said this is my baby. I tell anyone if anything happens to this girl we will go mad. She said, ‘I’ll phone you when we get there,’ which she does. She phones and says, ‘Hi, I love you, I’m here.’ She phones three or four times wherever she is.
“Finally I allowed her to go, it was not the first time she was going to this boy’s house, she and her classmates had watched movies there before.”
The girl’s mother went home, but at about 4.30pm she received a call from the police saying her daughter had been raped. She says she swore at the police officer. “I could not believe him. I called my elder son who was in the bath. I felt I could not understand them. We arrived at the clinic. Her hair which she always wears tied back was loose, she was flushed, I don’t think she knew what had happened.
“When I put my arms around her I could feel her go limp. She said, ‘Mommy, they raped me.’ She said she had a soda water that made her feel sick, she doesn’t even drink coffee or Coca Cola, just soda water.”
The girl’s mother leaves the room, and the girl enters. She sits on the couch and holds a cushion tightly between her knees and chest. Her eyes are big but she speaks without faltering.
“[The boy] asked us if we wanted to go to his house for a party, but while we were waiting for his driver to fetch us, he said we should rather walk. We came to a very busy road and his friend bought soda water in a can, opened it and held his satchel close to it.
“I tasted it and said it smelt funny and tasted bad. They said it was old stock. I told them I didn’t want it, but they said they had spent all their money buying me a colddrink. They said, ‘Don’t offend us.’
“I didn’t want to offend them. But then I felt dizzy and disoriented, they said it was because it was hot, I must keep walking.
“We got to a veld, they said it was a shortcut to [the boy’s] house. I said I did not want to walk through it, but they said it would take too long to walk around it. We were about 12m from the road, [the friend] said, let’s play fight. I said no.
“He put my hands behind my back and I began kicking out. [The boy] pulled down my pants, his fly was down and he raped me while [his friend] held me down. Then [the boy] put his hand over my mouth and sat on me while [his friend] raped me.
“They told me to get up and pulled up my pants. I said, ‘Why did you do this to me?’ and they said, we didn’t touch you.
“A bakkie, a white Nissan, I think, with a man with black hair going grey stopped. He seemed about 50 and had an accent like someone from Zimbabwe, sort of British but not. He asked what was going on. The boys said they had found me there. The man said he would take me to the police. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know him. But the boys pushed me. [The friend] waved as we pulled off.
“The man took me to a garage. There was a blonde lady there. I told her I had been raped. She took me to the bathroom, and told me to go to the toilet and wash up. I fell asleep while she called the police. They came, but I did not want to go with them. I told them I had been raped.”
She bites her lip and rocks as she speaks. “I don’t want to be in the same class as them, but it’s unfair I can’t be at school when I haven’t done anything wrong. And I’m scared: if they are with politics they can do something with my mom and dad.” Asked what, she says: “They can get them killed or something.”
Does she feel different? “I have mood swings, I cry and want to fight, I get angry and think, why me? If I think about it I want to throw up.” Her mother says the girl sometimes gets violently ill. She has just ended a course of anti-Aids drugs and goes for her first HIV test next week.
And what of the boys? “I want them to go to jail. I think people who do this have problems. I think they should be suspended from school, or the school should let them come one day and then make them stay away the next day and allow me to go to school. Why am I the one who has to stay at home?”