A violent land -- for women and men
● SA is a violent country for women and men, and the criminal justice system fails all victims, experts said this week.
Asked why men killed and raped women, Wits University gender researcher Lisa Vetten said violence in SA was directed at both men and women.
She said police murder statistics showed that a man was 5.6 times more likely to be murdered than a woman.
“There is a relationship between violence towards men and violence against women.
“Men do horrible things, but in many cases horrible things have been done to them.”
In response to calls for the death penalty and harsher rape sanctions, Vetten said: “When we are upset we clutch at straws. Problems are complex and difficult. There are no quick fixes.”
The justice department admitted this week that “only 10% of those who commit murder are caught and convicted. This needs to change.”
In the past financial year, 68 judgments were handed down to men charged with murdering a female. In these, 66 men were convicted and two acquitted. Though crime statistics are not yet available for the past financial year, in the previous year, 2,930 female murders were reported.
Figures for rape also paint a bleak picture for women. A study by the Medical Research Council released in 2017 found that of the 3,953 rapes reported in 2012, only 731 cases went to court, of which 340 ended in a guilty verdict, years later. Problems the detailed study uncovered included the incorrect use of rape kits, rape kits not sent to forensic laboratories for analysing, no witness statements taken and police visiting the crime scene in only about half of all cases.
Jeanne Bodenstein, advocacy co-ordinator at Rape Crisis, said there were many barriers to reporting rape, including a lack of faith in the criminal justice system.
The criminal justice system is made up of the police, forensic services and the court system. “If these components are not specialised and victim-centred, they can cause serious secondary trauma,” she said.
Khulisa Social Services NGO director Lesley Ann van Selm said factors that drove violence and rape were complex. “There are no consequences for violence at school.” She said substance abuse played a role, but that too was a symptom of societal problems.
Tarisai Mchuchu-Macmillan, executive director of support service Mosaic, said men did not always think of rape as violence.
She said women also fostered problems. “Teenagers get raped by their uncle and the mother will say he gives food and pays school fees, so he can’t go to jail. Or they choose not to report it because they do not want to cause division in the family.”
Gender activist Mbuyiselo Botha said men have been raised to believe women belong to them. He said it was important for men in communities to act as father figures.