When will South Africa treat women with respect?

I left South Africa temporarily in late August 2010 to pursue a programme on Human Rights with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in New York. My heart was bubbling with excitement of this new opportunity and yet at the same time I felt that I would miss time with my family and friends and often just for a little while worried about their safety.

A week later I could not believe the headlines about the neatly dressed serial rapist in the Hillbrow area of Johannesburg. He raped 12 women in less than a month – that is too long a time to wait to capture this animal. It felt as though the police followed behind his footstep as though to make sure higher statistics of sexual violence were the prize for the winners – rapists. ‘Who raped the most women today? S’bu did you say 10! I hear Vusi saying 12.’ (Vusi and S’bu are the alleged rapist’s names in Hillbrow.)

The concern from the South African police is nearly zero when it comes to sexual violent crimes. I have had friends harassed many times by police on reporting sexual abuse. A colonel who was asked to comment on the rapist had this to say to a journalist: ‘The statistic is that only one in nine rapes are reported so I think there must be many more than 12 rapes by this rapist.’ If this seems to have elevated the statistics, it would make sense to stop it, right? I did not feel the urgency in that statement and the one that followed. He said: ‘The suspect is targeting young black females between the ages of 19 and 21 in and around the Johannesburg area and more recently in Pretoria.’

The reports of sexual violence in South Africa read like a joke, I have found. I say that because it does not sound urgent or important to raise alarm over the rape of 12 women in less than a month. If you find the articles in the paper you are lucky. Most mainstream media papers do not cover these stories in the headlines. If they do they are sure to disappear within hours of publication with a twist, as with the Jules story of the 15-year-old girl who was gang raped – and then not, and then and then… The stories are no more than 200 words and so it can be hard to find such a small article.

Just to be in touch with the news at home, I found an article by Melanie Nathan that made my body hurt and quiver with pain. She was describing the rapes of women in South Africa and how President Zuma had failed all women and lesbians in South Africa. I felt as though I had washed my hands with blood over the continuous loss of women’s lives to sexual violence in my country. I felt the land filled with blood of those many women lost and some surviving and awaiting justice to be handed down to the criminal. When is the day coming? Why does it take so long? We did well with the World Cup courts, was that just for the world to see and now the true colours of our country come out? Is that the reason the media is being threatened, so we cannot tell the truth of our women in our country being raped, killed and abused with no recourse of the perpetrators?

The sad thing is that the article not only about the lives of two women but more: One who just took her life because she could not take the pain of seeing her perpetrators anymore and the other a survivor waiting her day in court. Well, that is if the police arrest the men who raped her, whom she sees frequently roaming the streets. The two represent the life stories of many other women who have been tortured and raped.
My bones are weak, though my mind is strong and I want to say that it is a fact that stories about issues that affect and violate the rights of women are not as sexy, therefore they do not make the news headlines.

I recall the media’s attention in the last couple of years in South Africa; Zuma and the rape allegations, Zuma and the Schaiks, Thabo Mbeki and the arms deal, Schaiks release from jail due to ill health and that he had to be at peace with his family and whatever happened to the woman who made the shower head popular? I guess she ceased to exist in the media, another woman done wrong…

So the many women who suffer today and wonder when their voices will be heard with continued fear for their lives, live on in South Africa. The research to be launched in March 2011 by Gender Links and MRC just gives the tip of the whole iceberg in South Africa. Daily, women fear of being raped and touched inappropriately over and over; this is enough torture just thinking about it – and then it has happened. The worst fear that kills a person is not being able to tell whether you are being raped in your mind or it is really happening over and over. And when you do wake up, you realise that you were never asleep, and the rapists laugh in your face. That is the fact of South Africa and for a country of such young democracy it is paining and beyond imagining.

We are to reach the decade to celebrate the decade’s mark and we must stand together and keep strengthening the women’s social movements further from the cores of our communities. The number of women who hold these countries and states together such as the care workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, sisters, mothers and grandmothers must stand together again and rip this evil’s roots out for good. Sixteen days is not enough and let’s make it 365 days and weed these criminals out of our communities and find alternatives for security for all us and be able to read better stories of our children growing up in a safer community.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Glenda Muzenda is a 2010 Human Rights Advocate from South Africa at Columbia University.
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