After its first year of implementation, a project to prevent crime in schools is proving successful Khadija Magardie Two teenage boys dressed in school uniform clamber out of nearby bushes and walk almost casually into the quadrangle, which is full of pupils at break-time. One smiling boy is pulling up his trouser zipper. Soon after they have sauntered over to a group of boys standing near a classroom, a schoolgirl, uniform torn, runs screaming out of the same bushes.
The scene is in fact a rehearsed one, and part of an anti-rape play being staged by pupils of Phambili High School in Umbilo, Durban. But rape itself is a very real threat for the female pupils of the school, both inside and outside the school. The Medical Research Council (MRC) recently released statistics indicating that approximately a third of all rapes committed against under-age girls are perpetrated by schoolteachers. Earlier this year, an NGO, CIETafrica, found that one in three schoolgirls have experienced sexual harassment at school – which was seldom reported. The director of the MRC’s women’s health unit was quoted in a weekend newspaper as saying the council was “shocked by the finding that teachers are the major perpetrators of child rape”, but added that the problem was an ongoing and endemic one, saying “no one experienced in education seems to be surprised”.
Phambili High School, nearly all of whose students are black, is the typical “bad reputation” school. Less than a kilometre away, Brettonwood High School, a formerly whites-only school, but which now has mainly black pupils, has vast sports fields, well-stocked classrooms, and a host of extra-curricular activities to keep students out of trouble. Phambili, by contrast, has little in common with its neighbouring Model C schools. The school, run on the premises of a former Afrikaans-medium, whites-only school, has nothing – except a dedicated and motivated teaching staff who have for years been battling to keep the school afloat in the face of ever dwindling resources. What the two schools do, however, have in common, is a pilot venture called the Crime Reduction in Schools Project (Crisp). The project, say both teachers and staff, is turning the school around.
Masero Gcumisa (18), who is a grade 11 student at Phambili, is one of a group of senior learners who have started an education programme that aims to tackle the problem of sexual violence, as well as HIV/Aids. Many of the students spearheading the project relate personal experiences which they say galvanised them into action. Gcumisa says a friend of hers at the same school was raped by a fellow pupil. Another female learner says her cousin, a toddler, was raped and contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Zodwa Magasela (18) was nearly abducted on her way home from school when a group of drunk men tried to force her into a taxi. Sexual violence in schools is endemic. According to Joanne Hardman, the Crisp project facilitator at Phambili, preliminary statistics of a rape incidence survey at the school show that nearly 6% of children ranging from age 13 to 18 at Phambili have indicated that they have been raped. Hardman is involved in counselling of pupils who have been raped. She adds that a thorough study or survey of the issue among the senior grades has still not been sufficiently undertaken. And as anecdotal evidence has suggested, assaults on schoolgirls are not only carried out by outsiders but also by fellow pupils and even teachers. One of the boys involved in the education group says some boys from the school “give out information” about the girls at the school to outsiders. “They maybe don’t like a girl who is rude to them in class, so they go and tell some ‘tsotsis’ outside where she lives, what route she takes home – sometimes they tell other boys if the girl carries money, or maybe if she has a cellphone,” he says. This makes schoolgirls “easy targets” for attack. Schoolgirls say perpetrators often appear “decent”, and loiter around the school gates in nice clothing and drive flashy cars blaring the latest music. But these men are often “jackrollers” – groups of men who abduct and gang-rape women. And most schools do not have counsellors or programmes to deal with the problem. According to an article published by the education policy unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, sexual violence against schoolgirls “results in psychological damage, including low self-esteem, poor levels of partici-pation in learning activities, and even dropping out of school”. Coupled with the burden of possible pregnancy, it can even lead some to suicide.
The pupils of Phambili have produced a video of their anti-rape play that Hardman says will be distributed to other schools and form part of a peer-education programme. Together with the resource centre based at the school – which offers a counselling service, further study information and reproductive health information centre – the production of the video is part of Crisp’s aim to reduce crime in schools in a society where youth are both victims and perpetrators of crime.
The project, situated at the University of Natal, Durban, celebrates its first anniversary this week. According to project leader Colin Collet-Van Rooyen, it aims to address issues of violence and crime and their effect on pupils – particularly when such events occur within the school environment or its immediate surrounds. Jointly funded by Absa and the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Crisp relies on university students from various disciplines, like social work and nursing, who are placed as project officers at the various target schools to run the programme. Interventions include group and individual counselling services, diversity training, particularly at schools with a racially diverse population, and primary health care. The latter includes Aids education at target schools, which are both primary and secondary schools. The latest project taken on by Crisp is a schools trauma action group. The service would include a telephone service to which schools could call in to report crime, and the dispatch to the school of a trained person who will engage in trauma debriefing. It also aims to follow up on the incidents in question with the South African Police Service. With increasing gun-related violence in schools, the need for effective yet short-term trauma counselling is becoming of paramount importance to educators.
Crisp project managers say they hope the project will be replicated in other parts of the country. In this way, they say, trauma will have a lesser effect on both pupil and teacher well-being, but also on school routine as a whole.