Politics
Thabo Mbeki attacks article  by Charlene Smith appearing in the Sunday Independent

Police this week reported that they were achieving success in combating all crimes but for rape.
Commissioner Jackie Selebi said there were 115,3 cases per 100 000 people in 1994, compared with 113,7 in 2003-04. Selebi said rape statistics might be exaggerated because many rape cases were reported on a Friday and Saturday night, only to be withdrawn on a Monday.
It’s the withdrawal of cases that bears closer examination because it says nothing about women “lying” about rape as the ignorant might believe, but it says everything about a society that fails women and children, and is allowing AIDS to proliferate without check.
South Africa has the highest rates of rape in the world according to Interpol – and the highest incidence of HIV. The National Prosecuting Authority tells us that 50% of all cases before SA courts are rape except for Durban and Mdantsane where it is 60% of cases.
Although the SA Law Commission estimates there are 1,69m rapes a year, on average only 54 000 rape survivors lay charges each year.
Why? It’s because rape survivors are treated so badly by so many.

But every time a rape survivor doesn’t lay a charge she allows a rapist or rapists – because 75% of rape in SA is gang rape – to believe that he can do it again. And he, or they, will; again and again, until a rape survivor does battle with the police, doctors, psychologists and the courts to get the justice she deserves, and to protect the next woman or child.
A Medical Research Council study into conditions for rape survivors in Gauteng in 2002, found that the treatment of rape survivors by police, medical and court personnel was deplorable. Two researchers were so traumatized by what they witnessed that they had to go for counseling.
The Medical Research Council reported: "that 26% of doctors and nurses who treated rape cases didn't think them a serious medical problem."
Yet rape carries the risk of sexually transmitted illnesses including HIV, pregnancy, a range of other infections and long term psychological scarring.
Last year cabinet removed section 21 from the new Sexual Offences Bill that would give Post Exposure Prophylaxis (medication to prevent HIV) as well as medication to prevent STIs and pregnancy to rape survivors. They left in section 22 which guarantees medical care to the rapist and undertakes to rehabilitate any alcohol or narcotics addictions he might have.
In other words, government will help remove self inflicted addictions from the criminal, but won’t have legislation compelling hospitals to give the medication that prevents criminal inflicted HIV from women and children.
Professor Ames Dhai of the University of Natal points out that there are twice as many rape survivors at risk of seroconversion to HIV than babies born in SA to HIV+ mothers, and yet there are few calls for PEP for rape survivors. She asks: "Is it because of residual stigma against those raped?"
Just over a month ago a 21-year-old student was forced at knifepoint into an alley off Long Street, Cape Town and raped. When she went to Groote Schuur hospital, she, like many rape survivors found it difficult to use the word “rape.” She told the admissions clerk she had been attacked. Because government hospitals don’t see the necessity to train staff to be sensitive toward this problem, he told her to see her private doctor. She had to wait until the next morning – and yet the administration of PEP is urgent, it has to take place within less than 72 hours after the first act of penetration or attempted penetration to prevent HIV.
Her doctor, being as incompetent as most GPs are in dealing with rape survivors – in part because most universities give scant training to medical students in how to deal with rape - made her wait while he tried to figure out what medicines she should have. He finally gave her a prescription for two months worth of PEP, instead of just 28 days.
It took her six hours and eight chemists to find a chemist that stocked antiretrovirals – she finally sat in the eighth chemist, who didn’t have the drugs and refused to move until he could tell her where she could find them. Only then did a chemist pick up a phone and help her access them.
In the country with the world’s highest rate of HIV and rape, why do so few pharmacies stock anti-retrovirals, or at the very least 3 day PEP starter packs for rape survivors? This failure has nothing to do with the new medical regulations – few were stocking ARVs before.
The young woman’s father phoned the police from Johannesburg, and was told that the cameras on Long street had not picked up anything untoward on that night, so there was no point in laying a charge.

Failures like these, lead to statistics like these:
* UNAIDS reported last year that in SA two and a half times more women are infected than men because many women experience forced sex.
* Unicef reports that six times more girl children than boys in Africa are infected with HIV.
* A Human Sciences Research Council study found a significant cohort of HIV infected children whose mothers were not HIV+ - how did they become infected?
* In SA, police tell us, 41% of those raped are under the age of 12. In Meadowlands, Soweto, police say that 90% of rape in that community is against children younger than 12, but too, Superintendent Nico Snyman, head of that police station, says that despite a good arrest rate only a small percentage of cases get prosecuted because families will accept ‘compensation’ from the rapist or rapists and the child is then prevented from testifying.
In the case of a young man raped in Wentworth, Durban three years ago when he was 14, the thugs who raped him offered his impoverished grandmother R3 000 to get him to drop the case. She wanted the money, he refused despite ongoing threats.
Investigating officers were changed three times, the prosecutors four times. He went for counseling at a wellknown child counseling centre but because he is an orphan and his gran unemployed he couldn’t afford bus fare to continue and no-one bothered to go to him.
Last week the case against the accused was dismissed for lack of evidence. The prosecutor did not add extortion to the charge sheet nor had she bothered to get anyone to testify how he took rat poison after the rape and spent a week in Addington Hospital’s psychiatric ward because he was so traumatized. The investigating officer was on leave and did not testify, no victim impact statement was used. < br>Gangsters got away with the rape of a boy because no-one cared – and this was a case the NPA’s Sexual Offences unit received frequent complaints about.
A nine year research study by Cape Town’s Red Cross Children’s Hospital, published in the SA Medical Journal in December 2002 found that the average age of children raped was three.
Research has shown that 40% of those raped in SA are at risk of becoming HIV+ if they do not receive PEP.
Experts believe that if post exposure prophylaxis was given immediately to SA rape survivors we would cut new HIV transmission dramatically and yet pathetically little is done to advance this HIV preventative mechanism.
What are the costs of providing PEP? The cost to government of each HIV test is less than 60c, according to the Department of Health. PEP costs it around R60 for 28 days. To treat 54 000 reported rapes each year would cost government less than R600 000.
Rape specialist, Dr Adrienne Wulfsohn, says the hospital costs of treating a rape survivor who contracts HIV is around R600 000 each during her shortened life.
Better treatment of rape survivors will result in more reporting and the confidence to go through with the case. Most rapists are involved in other crimes – you jail a rapist and you put away a dangerous criminal responsible for a variety of crimes. South Africans need to become more serious about combating this crime. Ends.
Charlene Smith, a journalist, was raped and stabbed in her home in 1999 and has since become an internationally recognized expert in sexual violence and post exposure prophylaxis.

FURTHER NOTES WRITTEN TO CONTEXTUALISE THE INACCURATE ATTACK ON ME BY PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI

What I wrote the day after I was raped and stabbed in my home on April 1, 1999, and published on 8 April in M&G: "I want you to know that rape is not about race, as some South Africans think. It is not about what men do. It is about what a few sick individuals do, it has nothing to do with race or malehood."

Also full context of what I wrote in June 2000 for Washington Post and which 4 years later is still annoying the President:
"AIDS in Africa will not end through the use of condoms or an elusive vaccine, the key to a reduction in this pandemic is a change in attitude; and not just attitudes to safe sex, but in attitudes towards women.
"In Africa, even if we develop a vaccine or distribute billions of condoms and the continent is already awash in latex, unless we begin working on male attitudes towards women - and that requires looking at the role of culture, tradition and religion - we will get nowhere.
“In doing this there is a need to reflect on how modernisation has warped cultural attitudes. Writer on African cultural beliefs and African mystic, Credo Mutwa notes that African society is traditionally matriarchal and women are considered to have two souls, one in their head and the other in the womb. He says that the rape of a woman is an attack on her second soul, her womb soul, and is unforgivable.
That is why in some communities, because of police inaction, vigilante groups are killing rapists.... Mbeki is ignoring the evidence and lessons supplied by African AIDS research which is among the best in the world; instead, at a recent conference he convened for scientists to discuss whether or not HIV causes AIDS, he invited primarily white American AIDS dissidents.
"AIDS is Thabo Mbeki's Achilles heel - the man who would lead Africa from the misery of economic poverty will, if his policies continue, preside over graves.
"The dissidents, whose cause Mbeki espouses, say that in Africa AIDS is caused by a lack of hygiene and poor nutrition. Which might make sense until you realise that there are members of Mbeki's inner circle who have HIV. Or the SA National Defence Force that has a 70% rate of infection - they have accomodation, good food and exemplary hygiene. Or mineworkers - infection rates are very high in Carletonville gold mines, yet mineworkers live in clean mine-provided accomodation and have plentiful food.
"But tell that to chief undertaker Mbeki."

In my chapter on religion and rape, in my book, I write: "For most of the five decades of apartheid, religious groups were either silent or complicit in a crime against humanity ...For two millenia religious groups have been silent about the rape and abuse of women and children."

The chapter that precedes it is titled: "The Penis as a Dangerous Weapon ... and other mythology" and the quote I have in itals preceding that chapter is from Vusi Mavimbela, adviser to SA President Thabo Mbeki, 1998, he wrote: "The process of democratisation is incomplete without the emancipation of African women. The liberation of the African woman will set free more than half of the African population for it to contribute fully in the third moment of a continental renaissance."

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