Sexual Attacks Soar in a S. Africa in Transition

Tanye Langenhoven remembers a sudden weight descending on her in the dark, a cold knife blade on her throat and then a low voice whispering in her ear.

“I prayed to God to help me,” the 27-year-old college media officer said, recalling the night two years ago when she was raped in her bed. “I prayed for it to be over. I prayed the man would not kill me.”

But becoming a statistic--a rape occurs about every 10 minutes in South Africa--only began her ordeal.

Sitting forward in her chair, smoking and fingering a gold chain around her neck, Langenhoven described how overwhelmed and undertrained medical and justice systems left her feeling helpless, abused and angry.

The government doctor, a white man, chatted about apartheid’s national anthem while he examined Langenhoven, a woman of mixed-race ancestry.

An investigating detective dismissed her fears of being alone with him so soon after the rape. Later, he offered to tell her the forensic results in exchange for a favor--she wasn’t sure whether he wanted sex or money.

In court, the detective said he had lost the evidence, which forced the judge to dismiss what to Langenhoven had seemed an open-and-shut case against a neighborhood man.

Such stories are common and show the crisis over one of South Africa’s most prevalent crimes. Police received reports of 50,481 rapes last year, nearly 14,000 of them crimes against girls younger than 18.

The total was up 18% from 1994, when South Africa’s incidence of rape--105.3 per 100,000 women--was already one of the highest in the world. By comparison, the 1994 statistic for the United States was 39.2 rapes per 100,000 women.

Gang rape is so commonplace that there is a local name for it: “jackrolling,” derived from a gang in the Soweto township in the 1980s.

“It is overwhelming,” said Bernadette Van Vuuren of the Cape Town group Independent Resources Aimed at Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. “But it has to be overwhelming to force the community to deal with it.”

The problem has deep roots in South Africa’s traditional patriarchy and is further exacerbated by a criminal culture spawned by the oppressive brutality of the apartheid era.

Like elsewhere in the world, rape in South Africa often is a crime of power and violence. But changing attitudes about the role and rights of women get some of the blame.

A recent police report said a new emphasis on gender equality under President Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress government has caused some men to rape as a way to strike out at perceived discrimination. Professionals who work with rape victims say gangs that target girls going to school want to impregnate them to “keep them in their place.”

But Boitumelo Kekana at the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg said many South African rapists believe they are entitled to sex whenever they want it and view rape as a casual pastime.

The justice system, limping from the demands of a violent society in transition after apartheid’s end in 1994, remains bound by old myths.

“Police still ask you what you were wearing, what time of night it was, what you were doing there,” noted Mercy Hlungwani, a psychiatric nurse who works with rape victims.

And a victim’s court testimony comes under a common law provision called “the cautionary rule,” which says women cannot be trusted to give an impartial account of their pain. Fighting that rule is like tilting at windmills, said Bronwyn Pithey, an expert on rape laws.

Courts convict only 50% of prosecuted rape suspects, compared with 80% of defendants accused of other violent crimes.

Frustration has caused some people to take the law into their own hands. In January, a mob castrated a man believed to have raped an 8-year-old girl in a Johannesburg suburb.

Some progress has occurred, due in part to women like Langenhoven, who have gone to newspapers and seminars to talk openly about what happened to them.

Under public pressure, the Department of Justice declared rape a priority crime in May. Officials say they want to increase the minimum sentence for armed rape--now 10 years--to 15 years and intend to tighten bail restrictions for suspects.

Support groups for rape victims are being paid to conduct sensitivity training for police officers. Several police stations in Johannesburg now have sexual assault units, and a separate court was set up in Cape Town to deal with rape cases.

Police attribute some of the increase in reported rapes to victims’ greater willingness to come forward.

“I feel, perhaps when you have seen my face and attach a name to the unknown victim, it will make the experience real,” said Namboniso Gasa, the wife of a Parliament member.

Gasa, who was raped earlier this year, discussed the situation at a news conference.

Progress, however, gets buried in the daily reports of sexual assaults, like a story told by a Soweto woman at a conference on child rape held in May.

Her 5-year-old daughter was playing next door when something happened, said the woman, who addressed the conference on condition of anonymity.

“She came back jumping and screaming, and took the pillow and went to sleep under it,” the woman said. “I woke her, and when she opened her thighs, I saw the blood. I washed her, and I cried.”

Despite pressure from her neighbors not to get a black man into trouble, the woman reported the crime. Police took the suspect to her house, and her daughter shook with fear when she saw him.

But the case was dismissed because a medical examination was not conducted until the day after the crime occurred, the woman said.

“I think, as women, men don’t care about us,” she said. “They don’t feel the pain, they don’t think this is wrong, and we will always stand up there alone.”