CLAIRE KEETON, Johannesburg | Saturday
THE gang-rape of a nine-month-old baby has finally jolted South Africans into acknowledging everyday sexual violence against children, and to demand why it is so widespread.
One factor is a widespread myth that sex with a virgin will cure you of Aids: some 4,7-million South Africans, or one in nine, were HIV-positive at the end of 2000, and the deadly disease is spreading at a rate of about 1 500 new infections daily.
“It is an ignorant, unfounded and perverse belief,” said Lulu Xingwana, a member of parliament for the ruling African National Congress.
The violent legacy of apartheid is seen as another reason.
“The terrible impact of living in a country at war with itself during apartheid … is the fundamental basis of this. When you grow up with violence, you learn to be violent,” said Lynne Cawood, a director of the Childline support group.
Five infants between the ages of one and five are known to have been raped since the arrest last week of six men charged with raping and sodomising baby “Tshepang”
That provoked a national outcry, with more than 1 000 demonstrators protesting when the suspects, aged between 22 and 66, made a preliminary appearance in a court in the central town of Kimberley.
Newspapers and radio stations have taken up the case, and activists are demanding action.
“Tshepang,” a nickname meaning “Have Hope”, bestowed to protect her privacy, has been tested for the HIV virus and is in hospital in Kimberley. Doctors say she is recovering physically, but is likely to have long-term psychological trauma.
Police reports show that 58 children are the victims every day of rape or sexual attacks, but “the majority of children find it very difficult to report rape and the number may be much higher,” said Cawood.
The perpetrators “come from all walks of life; they are poor and rich, they are black and white, they come from all professions,” said Herman Conradie of the University of South Africa in Pretoria.
“They are people who usually cannot control their aggression … they usually say it’s a once-off situation … they use alcohol for an excuse.
“The perpetrators are usually family members,” Conradie said.
“The morality of our society has degraded to such an extent that men are not even scared to be caught doing things like that.”
Deputy President Jacob Zuma said Tshepang’s rape symbolised how the moral fibre of South Africa had deteriorated.
“I had not imagined a society where children are no longer safe from their own grandfathers,” he lamented.
But the perpetrators can be young, too: the private e-tv television channel on Friday night interviewed a 12-year-old who confessed to rape, and a Childline survey from June to December 2000 found 51% of perpetrators of sexual offences against children were under the age of 20.
Five little girls at a primary school in Katlehong, east of Johannesburg, recently told Childline they had been threatened with rape by five gun-wielding schoolmates aged about 11.
“This threat turned out to be true … and the guns were real,” Cawood said.
Annie Varaden, a Childline clinical coordinator, said early emotional deprivation and neglect, lack of supervision and the absence of positive male role models in single-parent families were among factors behind rapes by boys.
Life imprisonment is the mandatory sentence for child rape but where “substantial and compelling circumstances” exist, it may be reduced.
Superintendent Anneke Pienaar, head of the police child protection unit, said that 69 life sentences were imposed in the first nine months of this year for crimes against children.
She said this was better than 2000, when 64 life sentences were recorded for crimes against both children and women.
Some 10 times more police officials are assigned to fight child abuse than a couple of years ago, she said.
Ten million rand has been allocated to the protection of children’s rights through the office of the child, based in the presidency.
“The bulk of these are donations, which have gone into public awareness campaigns,” said office head Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva.
She said these measures, targeted at poor rural areas and informal settlements, were showing results as “more and more children and parents are coming forward to report abuse”. – AFP