More than 100 people, most of them wearing the purple T-shirts of the One in Nine campaign, gathered outside the Cape High Court on Friday to protest against the treatment of rape victims.
Organiser Johanna Kehler, of the Aids Legal Network, said similar protests were being held at high courts in other centres, including Johannesburg, Durban and Grahamstown.
The protests were organised by One in Nine, the campaign launched in February in support of ”Khwezi”, the unnamed complainant in the Jacob Zuma rape case.
”It’s to speak out, show support and solidarity with everyone who is a survivor and who is encouraged to speak out in cases of sexual violence,” Kehler said.
”While we all acknowledge the Zuma case is certainly a landmark case, it is equally just an ordinary case in the sense that what happens in the Zuma case happens in many other cases all over the country on a daily basis.”
This, she said, is primarily due to flawed legislation that, among other things, allows the sexual history of a complainant to be admissible as evidence.
This could easily discredit the character of the complainant.
”As long as court proceedings allow secondary victimisation to take place … more and more women might actually consciously make a decision [that] ‘I am not going to lay a charge’ because of what is going to happen as part of the court proceedings.”
The protests were being held outside the high courts ”because that is where cases of rape and sexual offences are tried”, she said.
The Cape Town protesters, most of them women, included representatives of Rape Crisis, Nicro, the Treatment Action Campaign, the Women on Farms project, and shelters for victims of abuse.
They sang and held up posters, including one that read: ”Asking for sexual history of women who speak out is not justice.”
In a statement issued to coincide with the protests, One in Nine demanded that the Sexual Offences Bill, which will change the way rape cases are dealt with by the courts, be passed ”within the first quarter of 2006”.
It also demanded policies for ensuring that court and processes around gathering evidence do not further traumatise rape survivors. — Sapa