Aaron Nicodemus
PERSON OF THE YEAR … CHARLENE SMITH
Charlene Smith’s home has become a national clearing house for information on rape and Aids. She receives five or six calls a day from rape survivors, asking for help and support. She gets calls from government officials, women’s groups, doctors, policemen, insurance companies, men married to rape survivors. She has invited rape survivors to stay in her home temporarily, when they’ve had nowhere else to go. Rape, and what to do about it, has become the focus of her life.
Smith calls herself, and the millions like her, a “rape survivor”. Not a rape victim. She is adamant about that. “Once you’re a survivor, not a victim, you’ve already taken the first step to recovery,” she said. It may seem like a little thing, but the term is slowly changing the way people who have been raped view themselves.
Hardly any discussion on rape in South Africa takes place without some mention of Smith. Unwittingly, she has become the national representative for rape survivors. She is their friend, their confidante and their staunchest supporter. Smith regularly speaks out about the country’s horrific track record in dealing with rape, its low conviction rate, its non-existent support network. It can be argued that the country’s perception of rape, of anti- retroviral drugs and of the ballooning Aids crisis has changed because Smith decided to tell her story.
Her story in the April 9 Mail & Guardian began: “Every 26 seconds in South Africa a woman gets raped. It was my turn last Thursday night.”
She said recently that she has not reread the story once since pounding it out on her laptop computer.
“No one needed to have read it. They could have just turned the page. The extraordinary thing was that not only did people read it, it seemed to have a very profound effect,” she said.
When she asked her children’s permission to write about her ordeal, she assured them, “This will only last for two weeks. Then we can go back to being normal people.” Rape was a topic that South Africans did not discuss openly, and Smith saw no reason to doubt that trend would continue once the details of her story faded from the national consciousness.
But the story struck a nerve in the national psyche. Calls flooded the newspaper and her home. She was besieged with requests to appear on television and radio. Flowers arrived at her home from dozens of strangers, including almost the entire Cabinet. “The phone didn’t stop ringing all day, and to tell the truth it hasn’t stopped ringing since,” she said.
Even seven months later, the rape still dominates her day. Recently a BBC film crew was in her home, carefully filming her steps on that fateful night. The same day police had stopped by earlier to take another statement for the case against her attacker. For a brief interview she had turned the phone off, expecting it to be full of messages in an hour’s time. “It has taken over my life. I don’t want this to be the rest of my life,” she said.
In the aftermath she’s become the consummate activist. Netcare, the health care group that refused to give her anti- retroviral drugs after the attack, now offers a free three-day starter pack of anti-retroviral drugs to rape victims on the day they are raped – including those who have no medical aid. The company also offers the full panoply of treatment for a month to those with medical aid coverage. Five insurance companies have written rape insurance policies, the first of their kind in the world.
Smith has pressured counselling agencies to change their tactics by asking direct questions right away, and allowing counsellors to touch rape survivors. The South African Medical Association has begun drawing up a policy to train all of its general practitioners about rape and anti- retroviral drugs, as have several medical schools.
Other developments, like a national police DNA database, groundbreaking rape legislation in Namibia and new studies on anti-retroviral drugs and Aids can partly be attributed to her work.
“Nothing is entirely as a result of what I’ve been doing,” she said. “I’ve been a catalyst; there are so many people out there doing amazing things. I think people have been able to push more successfully for some of these initiatives because of the increased awareness of rape.”
Why did Smith’s courage to tell her story affect so many people? She has her own theory. “It wasn’t particularly dramatic or brutal. I was an ordinary woman, coming home after an ordinary day. It was a rape that could have happened to anyone,” she said. “It happened to me, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I wrote about it.”