NEWS
Child rape is too important for just another summit

Johannesburg, South Africa - 17 November 2001. The rape of a nine-month-old baby in the Northern Cape and the spate of cases of child rape reported in its wake, shocking and disgraceful as they are, are not isolated events. They are rooted deep in a culture of violence in South Africa, a culture that has to be addressed with urgency and in concrete ways.

This is the view of Professor Neil Andersson, who led a CIETafrica (Community Information Empowerment and Transparency) social audit of sexual violence in southern Johannesburg. The audit involved more than 27,000 youth and found one in every 20 school girls aged 15 to 18 years had been raped in the year prior to the survey. One in every three school girls suffered sexual harassment at school. Many male youth had also been sexually abused. Male and female youth were at almost the same risk of unwanted sexual touching or verbal abuse.

If the frequency of sexual abuse of children was shocking, the opinions expressed by schoolchildren about sexual violence revealed a dangerous and destructive culture of violence. Eight out of every ten male school children said women were responsible for sexual violence. Three out of every ten thought women who were raped "asked for it" and two out of every ten said they thought women enjoyed being raped.

More surprising than the views of male youth were those of the female schoolchildren, who have internalised the daily risk of sexual violence as a set of disturbing attitudes and practices. More than one half of female youth said women were partly responsible for causing sexual violence. One out of ten female youth believed women were more drawn to sexually violent men. Only 2% of adult women in the same communities thought they had no right to avoid sexual abuse, but 12% of school-going female youth believed they had no right to avoid sexual abuse. More than one half of the youth -- male and female -- said forcing sex with someone you know is not sexual violence.

Deputy president Jacob Zuma has announced he will host a moral summit early next year. The question is what this will do about the culture that produces such extreme behaviour as the rape of a nine-month-old baby - and the sexualisation of violence against children and women throughout the country.

"A moral summit may be a first and necessary step for government to show it is beginning to take sexual violence seriously," says Dr Andersson, "but it must also address the culture of sexual violence. Communities urgently need material and technical support for local efforts to combat sexual violence. They need to know what has worked to reduce sexual violence in other places and they need to know how their own efforts add up to prevent it."

The CIETafrica social audit covered schools and communities in a multiethnic cross section of South African society -- in the business district of Johannesburg, suburbs like Glen Vista and Lenasia, townships like Soweto and informal settlements including Orange Farm.

The social audit, conducted in collaboration with the local government and with support and original data from the South Africa Police Service, gave rise to a number of community-based interventions against sexual violence. These included a local politician creating a regular forum where mothers and daughters could discuss sexuality, a school principal in Orange Farm who arranged for counselling to be available for learners and a guidance teacher who went beyond the call of duty to improve communication between teachers and learners.
"Even in the highly fractured communities of south Johannesburg and Louisvale in the Northern Cape," says Dr Andersson, "people have declared they find sexual violence unacceptable and they want to develop their own solutions to it.

"Unless these local community initiatives get support to learn from each other's successes, to grow and to prove what they can do to deal with the problem, there will be few practical advances against sexual violence on which to base strategies at a moral summit. Dreadful incidents like the Louisvale rape might continue to spark outcries when they filter through to the mass media, but the culture of violence that underpins these events will go unchallenged."

The full CIET report can be downloaded from http//www.ciet.org
Issued by CIETafrica - more information contact Marietjie Myburg, CIET Information Officer tel: 011 648 0434
fax: 011 648 4712
e-mail: cietafrica@ciet.org

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