The most dangerous places in South Africa are not big cities but scantly populated rural or border areas, including parts of the wine lands popular with tourists, a new crime-mapping tool showed on Sunday.
Although Johannesburg is synonymous with crime in the minds of many overseas visitors, the new computerised map charting the incidence of serious crimes across the country showed that the chances of being murdered or raped were higher in isolated rural areas, the Sunday Times reported.
The Crime and Victimisation Mapping Tool, launched this week by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention, combines data from two years of statistics on crimes such as murder, sexual assault of minors and house robberies with socio-economic data and crime-victim surveys.
Cape Town and Durban city centres were shown to be relatively murder-free compared with, for example, the Eastern Cape holiday resort of Jeffreys Bay or the Robertsvlei wine-growing region in the Western Cape, the map showed.
Contact crimes such as murder, rape and sexual assault of minors occur more frequently in rural areas where there was greater social contact, the statistics revealed.
A major driver of these crimes, at 80%, was alcohol abuse, Assistant Police Commissioner Chris de Kock told the paper.
House robberies and hijackings were more prevalent in areas with high levels of inequality and low levels of social contact, such as Gauteng, where one statistician noted, ”many people live in isolation behind high walls”. — Sapa-dpa