No one installs the windows in a house before they have built the foundations and the walls – and yet that is precisely what government is doing with its 20 new rape courts.
No prosecution can succeed without an effective police investigation, but nothing has been done to boost police capacity – despite Thoko Majokweni, who heads the sexual offences and domestic violence unit of the Office of the National Director of Public Prosecutions, confirming this week that in some areas complaints of domestic violence have ”gone up 100%” and that rape and violence against women is ”escalating rapidly”.
Instead of police investigation resources being increased, they are being put under more strain – domestic violence investigations have been added to the already onerous burden of special rape and child abuse detectives. In the 26 Johannesburg police districts covered by the sexual offences unit, 116 rapes were reported in February – there are 14 police officers to investigate those rapes and between them they share one computer and four vehicles.
That police unit already handles several thousand unresolved rape cases, and the dockets of all don’t even get opened because they lack enough staff or resources. Police officers in that unit are already among the most overworked of any in the country, and turnover is high. In Durban the courts have 7E000 rape cases waiting to be heard.
In 1998, there were 54E000 reported rapes – fewer than 3E500 made it to court. In places like Khayelitsha near Cape Town up to 17 rapes are reported to the local clinic each day.
Some women withdraw charges because the police investigations are so shambolic or the prosecutor so uncaring and inept that it retraumatises the woman or child who was raped. Many who are gang-raped (and 75% of South African women who are raped are gang- raped) withdraw charges because the gang terrorises them and their family afterwards – but police fail to take action, and courts release those who gang-raped on bail.
In my case, by the fifth day after the rape the office of the local commissioner of police informed me after I complained that a statement had still not been taken from me – that there was no such case, neither they nor the police station I reported it to could find any records of such a case, and yet about a dozen police officers had been at my home on the night of the rape.
The rapist made repeated threatening calls before and after the rape. I taped them. The police lost all but one tape – and the prosecution ignored my repeated pleas for a charge of intimidation to be added and the terrifying nature of the calls to be taken into account; the sole remaining tape where I was threatened with rape was never brought before court, nor was voice identification.
I refused to deal with the first prosecutor assigned to the case because of his arrogance; the second prosecutor, a woman, was little better. The first and last time she spoke to me was on November 22 – two weeks before the first trial. She explained nothing further to me thereafter, nor informed me of developments. Witnesses were subpoenaed five days before the first hearing, but by the end of the second hearing (of four), witnesses had still not been subpoenaed.
On the day the trial was reopened because the prosecutor had failed to introduce basic evidence – a failure that threatened the admission of critical DNA evidence – she spoke to me with such contempt, when I asked her before a hearing what was going to happen that day, that a friend, unused to courts, was horrified.
”Does she always speak to you like that,” she asked. ”No,” I responded, ”she never speaks to me.”
And she is a specially trained prosecutor for the rape courts which have been designed by Thoko Majokweni of the Office of the National Director of Public Prosecutions. Majokweni is determined that the courts will process cases more effectively and more humanely – but she is bedevilled by a culture of contempt for complainants, one that she acknowledges is so acute it is going to be difficult to remedy.
She too lacks the resources every investigator and prosecutor of sexual violence against women in this country experiences.
This does not mean there are not many wonderful prosecutors who work in appalling conditions with real commitment to obtain effective and fair convictions – some of the best are in Bloemfontein where those prosecutors are also active in establishing a 24-hour trauma centre. And Nickey Turner in Port Elizabeth became every woman’s heroine last year with her dogged and spirited prosecution of cricketer Makhaya Ntini.
Rape courts have been set up across South Africa in the only government move yet to combat the world’s worst statistics of rape and violence against women. The initiative is heavily funded by the Canadian government and with active assistance from the United States Department of Justice and the FBI in training prosecutors and investigators.
The rape courts, also a world first, are a fine attempt from the National Director of Public Prosecutions to reverse South Africa’s shameful violence against women and children, but it is doomed unless policing is dramatically improved and more resources apportioned to fight rape.
At present, unless a raped or abused woman fights harder than she ever has in her life for the conviction of the person who raped or abused her; unless she walks into the office of every official in the land, the rapist’s or abuser’s chance of walking free are high, and that is why our statistics are so high.
It is simply too easy to rape or beat a woman or child and to get away with it. The state is the rapist’s greatest ally.