The lost girls of South Africa (triggering)
Tomorrow night, C4 will be screening a Dispatches documentary, The Lost Girls of South Africa. I will be watching it closely.
In 2009, the Medical Research Council published survey data regarding rape and sexual assault in South Africa.
For those, like me, interested in statistics and how they are used, the survey was of 1,738 men in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces. The research was conducted in both rural and urban areas and included all racial groups, and responses were anonymous.
The statistics are horrific: a child is raped every 3 minutes in South Africa (according to the government statistics, there are 60 cases of child rape reported every day, but only 11.3% of rapes are reported. That works out at 530 cases of child rape per day, according to this site.). However, what is more disturbing is the survey results, which showed that 1 in 4 men admitted to having committed a rape. Think about that for a second. In the UK, no one would voluntarily describe themselves as a rapist (except in a very specific, thankfully rare circumstances). Even those convicted of rape find a way of convincing themselves that consent was somehow implied, or that it didn't "really count" as rape because of pick your reason. I doubt that anyone has done a survery of convicted sex offenders to see how many would self-identify as rapists or paedophiles, but I am guessing that the percentage will not be terribly high. In thissurvey, 1 in every 4 men - 1 in 4 of a cross-section of society, rather than a specific at-risk group - self-identified as having committed rape.
So what does this mean about the results? Either
- the 1 in 4 figure follows most other societies and is an under-statement with many not admitting to it, in which case I am horrified at what the real figure might be; or
- the 1 in 4 figure is accurate, in which case the respondents had no problem with saying, "yes, I'm a rapist". Which actually scares me more, because that is when rape stops being a crime, and starts being just one of those things you face, like missing the bus or a downpour on the way home from work: unpleasant, but ultimately inevitable. The survey found that 62% of boys over the age of 11 believed that forcing someone to have sex was not an act of violence.
South Africa is a country where a girl has a 1 in 3 chance of finishing school, but a 1 in 2 chance of being raped. Often the perpetrator is never brought to justice, because he is underage, because he is a relative, or due to the difficulty of prosecution. In many cases, the child then has to continue living alongside her rapist, sometimes in the same house. The survey found a surprising deviation from expectations, as the instances of HIV infection were not higher amongst rapists. There could be many reasons for this, but I strongly suspect that this has a great deal to do with the young age of the victims. The girls being assaulted are too young to be sexually active, and while the assault may well be enough to infect them, should their assailant be HIV+, the chances of female-to-male infection is actually a lot lower than male-to-female. In other words, if the girls are HIV+, the rapist may still walk away uninfected; whereas an assault by an HIV+ man has a much higher risk of infecting the victim.
In case you assume that this only applies to girls, rape is apparently an equal opportunity hazard, with 1 in 10 men saying that they have been raped by other men. The survey doesn't go on to separate out the samples, and I would be interested at the level of overlap between those who have been raped, and those who have raped.
These statistics are not improving: 1 in 20 of those surveyed reported raping someone in the last year. And what is the government doing about it? Not a great deal, by the looks of it. According to the US State Department travel advisory, South Africa has the highest recorded instances of rape in the world, and the FCO helpfully links to the Rape and Sexual Assault Board in its travel advisory . This just seems to be a fact of life in South Africa - as common-place a risk as pickpockets. And that's a terrifying thought.