CAPE TO CAIRO - 2
The office of the Child Protection Unit of the South African Police Service is an oasis of peace and tranquillity in a suburb dominated by ugly warehouse buildings. The walls are painted yellow and decorated with sunflowers and butterflies. Laughter can be heard coming from behind the office doors and you might almost be inclined to believe you were in a kindergarten. But in reality, it is the first port of call for the youngest of South Africa's victims of violence: babies and toddlers who have been sexually abused. Every day, 58 cases of this form of abuse are reported. Official statistics talk of 25.000 cases of child sex abuse a year, but the real figure could be twenty times higher.
Ruthless questioning
Take the case of a ten year old girl who was raped by her father who then threatened to kill her. On this particular morning, her case is being heard in court – two years after it actually happened. The wheels of justice grind slowly in South Africa. The head of the Child Protection Unit, Jan Swart (below right) is talking on the phone to a doctor who treated the girl at the time.
He would like him to appear in court as a witness because, as Jan Swart knows from experience: who is going to believe a traumatised child? He talks of lawyers who have demolished these small victims with their ruthless questioning.
"The neighbours mustn't know..."
Violence is nothing new in South Africa. During the apartheid years, many South Africans learnt that violence was a legitimate means of solving conflicts. But whereas the police are gradually getting street crime under control, violence against women and children is actually growing. More women are raped in South Africa than anywhere else: on average one every 26 seconds! The fact that the victims are getting younger all the time – nine month old baby Tshepang is one of the most recent victims of a brutal rape – is largely due to a myth that has been doing the rounds in the townships, according to which sleeping with a virgin is a cure for AIDS. The virgin myth – which in Victorian England was held to be a cure for syphilis – is now undergoing a renaissance in South Africa with fatal consequences: HIV positive men are sleeping with ever younger girls and infecting them with the virus. Mpumla – the young mother doesn't want to reveal her real name - was raped by four men and is now infected. "The neighbours mustn't know anything about it or else they'll throw me out" she says through tears in her hut made of cardboard and corrugated iron.
Hope for change
But Mpumla is lucky in one sense: at least she has a source of income. She heard about "Ithemba Labantu" – an aid project run by a pastor from Berlin called Otto Kohlstock. Ithemba enables 60 HIV positive women and girls aged between 18 and 30 to earn a modest living from beadwork. Ithebma Labantu literally means "Giving People Hope" and Hope is the name which doctors gave to baby Tsephang when she was brought in with horrible wounds.
Mpumla and all the others still haven't given up hope that the South African government will one day give up its wait-and-see attitude. For the time being, however, the country's Health Minister encourages AIDS sufferers to stick to garlic and olive oil. And President Thabo Mbeki is on record as saying that he has not seen anyone die of AIDS in his country.
Cape Town, 6th November 2003.