In a country where one in four women is raped and where months-old babies and 94-year old grandmothers are sexually assaulted, citizens are demanding action after a teenager was gang-raped, sliced open from her stomach to her genitals, and left for dead on a construction site Saturday in Bredasdorp, a Western Cape town. The 17-year old girl, lived long enough to identify one of her attackers, who was a 22 year old male, who was arrested Thursday. Police also made an arrest of a second suspect who is a 21-year old male.
Every few months, this South African nation, which has the highest rate or rapes among babies and young girls worldwide, will have a major outrage at a particularly brutal attack. Professor Rachel Jewkes, a doctor who is head of the Women's Research Unit of South Africa's Medical Research Council, stated that in the most populated province, Gauteng, 37 percent of surveyed males said that they had raped a woman or a child, with their first victim being a teenager. "This is a social disaster" Jewkes stated. The outrage over this rape led South Africa's President, Jacob Zuma, to vow "that government would never rest until all the perpetrators and all those that rape and abuse children and women, are meted with the maximum justice that law allows". The current maximum sentence for rape in South Africa is life in prison; the death sentence has been abolished. Zuma himself, wa accused of a rape by the HIV- positive lesbian daughter of a close friend in 2005.
Jewkes conducted a study in 2009 that shows 62 percent of the young men and boys that she surveyed, over the age 11, that forcing someone to have sexual intercourse was not an act of violence, and that the girls enjoyed being rape. This same study also found that a quarter of the women of South Africa are being raped, but only 1 in 25 will report the rape to the police. This casts doubt that the sexual crime rate in South Africa has actually decreased overtime since most women do not report it to any officials.
More studies show that nearly 90 percent of rape victims are raped by family members, friends, or other people that they know. There have been many reasons presented as to why South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world. One reason is that South Africa has a patriarchal society, where many of the men believe they are entitled to sex. A second reason is that fathers say that no man has the right to have sex with his child until he had her himself. Also psychologists say that humiliated men work out their anger on those that are closest and most helpless, which is their families. Another reason to blame is pervasive poverty, which dis empowers men and forces children to sleep in one-room shacks with adults. However, many believe that this is just an excuse.
This is a serious social problem that needs to be put to a stop. There was also a recent gang-rape in India as I was browsing through the current events. This doesn't just happen in countries overseas, it happens everywhere, possibly in our own surrounding area more than what we think it does. Reading over this article, it shows how men have the upper hand in these other countries and cultures, and they are extremely abusing that power they hold. Also it shows how rape may not be as serious of a crime to other cultures due to the fact that it may happen so often and the women and children are very fearful that they cannot report it to an official, so this only worsens the situation at hand.
Tiara Paylor
02/08/2013 7:30 pm
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/8278120/South-Africas-rape-outrage
No comments:
Post a Comment