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NEWS
MEBEKI TAKES ON THE ESTABLISHMENT, AGAIN

21 July 2000
By Ferial Haffajee
Financial Mail

The stats may be crude, but women say he's revisionist' President Thabo Mbeki's scepticism about the extent of rape in SA flies in the face of the reported statistics, as well as studies carried out by the SA Medical Research Council (MRC).

At the ANC's national general council in Port Elizabeth last week, Mbeki, for a second time this month, slammed suggestions that rape is endemic in this country. To say so, he implied, was unpatriotic.

But the latest available police statistic - 54 000 reported rapes in 1998 - is among Interpol's highest reported rape rates worldwide. Moreover, a national study by the MRC says that only one in 10 rapes is reported which, by simple arithmetic, suggests that rape is indeed a social pathology in this country.

Since first voicing concern about commonly used rape statistics in a speech to the National Council of Provinces last October, Mbeki has grown more strident in his criticism of the way in which rape in SA is portrayed.

His most recent target is outspoken rape survivor Charlene Smith, whom he has suggested is "blinded by racist rage"; but his general target is women's organisations that lobby against sexual violence.

At the ANC indaba last week, Mbeki said SA was a winning country, "despite the determined attempt by some of our compatriots to paint our country in the worst possible light, falsely charging, for instance, that we are the crime capital of the world', that we are a nation of rapists, that we are world leaders in corruption and that we lead humanity in deaths from Aids".

Mbeki's fight against the historic view that SA has a higher-than-average rape count has become tied to his battle with the medical establishment on the causation and treatment of Aids.

In his published correspondence with Democratic Party leader Tony Leon earlier this month, Mbeki wrote: "I imagine that all manufacturers of antiretroviral drugs pay great attention to the very false figures about the incidence of rape in our country, that are regularly peddled by those who seem so determined to project a negative view of our country."

Women's rights activists accept that rape statistics probably need closer scrutiny, given the flawed nature of the SA Police Service's crime figures in general. Statistics SA, for example, finds no basis for the use by the police of the multiplier that only one in 25 rapes is reported.

But to many in the women's lobby, Mbeki has moved beyond mere querying of the statistics to a tone that is "revisionist" about the prevalence of rape, even viewing it as a racist slur.

Statistics SA is due to release a report on rape in this country next month which is not expected to justify Mbeki's disavowal.

Neither will new research by the MRC, due to be published in August. MRC director of the Women's Health Unit, Rachel Jewkes, says a representative survey to test the prevalence of rape revealed a figure 10 times higher than reported rape statistics. A second study, the Demographic & Health 1998 Survey by the Department of Health, which collected data from 12 000 women around the country, found that 70% of the women canvassed said they had been raped in their lifetime.

"This suggests that reported police statistics deal with only the tip of the iceberg of rape and sexual coercion in SA," says Jewkes.

Mbeki, who last August said "one rape is a rape too many," seems to have changed tack. People Opposed to Women Abuse director Nthabiseng Mogale suggests this may be because "violence against women has a bearing on the success or failure of tourism, governance and on the image we're trying to project."