Originally posted on Is This AFRICA?:
They tell me that they will kill me, they will rape me and after raping me I will become a girl. I will become a straight girl.”
One in five South African men have admitted to “having sex with a woman who did not consent to intercourse”. I would just call it what it is: One in five South African men is a rapist. One in five. Nearly half of these men admit to “raping more than once”. Almost four out of five had raped their first victim before the age of twenty.
One in three women (worldwide) has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. One in three. For those of you who have a mother, a sister and a female friend all at the same time, let that sink in: one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Maybe it’s time to start talking to each other.
In South Africa, almost half of all women will be raped in their lifetime. I am not sure that there are italics enough in the world to express what I feel about these statistics. For every 25 ‘men’ brought to trial for rape, 24 will be acquitted. And those are just those who are brought to trial.
“At school I was betrayed by my best friend. He told me to come to his house for a school assignment but when I got to the house we fought until he hit me so hard I collapsed, and then he raped me because he said I needed to stop being a lesbian. Afterwards I got pregnant and had a baby. The second time my soccer friends and I were kidnapped at gunpoint and they took us somewhere far away and did what they wanted with us for three days. We told the police but the case just disappeared. Nothing happened because they all thought I deserved it. These men are still walking free.”
Nomawabo, 30, Limpopo, South Africa
“The second time”…
The term ‘corrective rape’ (as opposed to regular rape?) was introduced into the common vernacular when it became a widespread practice for (South) African males to attempt to rape the lesbian out of their victims. South Africa was the 5th country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. For South African (and other African) lesbians, this has proved to be more of a target on their backs than a civil rights victory.
“ “I thought he was going to kill me; he was like an animal. And he kept saying: ‘I know you are a lesbian. You are not a man, you think you are, but I am going to show you, you are a woman. I am going to make you pregnant. I am going to kill you.’
The attacker was known to Gaika, a neighbor.
“He started hitting me and I fought back. Then he started doing what he did to me. He pulled off my clothes and pushed me down on the bed. He did it more than once. He was holding me down, strangling me and pushing his hands hard on to my neck.”
The attack ended only ended after neighbors finally heard her screams, broke down the assailant’s door and found Gaika naked from the waist down on a bed and bleeding. They then held the assailant until police arrived.”
In their 2010/2011 Annual Report, The Triangle Project, a South African organisation whose stated mission is challenging homophobia and appreciating sexual diversity, wrote this:
“Our understanding is that rape is a form of gender violence that is rooted in patriarchal and hetero-normative systems of control and power. Rape is a means of maintaining control and power over women and their bodies and of policing gender and sexuality norms. These norms prescribe what a woman is, how a woman should behave and stipulate that women’s bodies belong to men. It is precisely for these reasons that lesbian women in particular are targeted.”
Rape is a violent, inhumane, incomprehensible abomination. If not a hate crime, it is certainly hateful. I do not subscribe to the idea that rape can be classified by circumstance or by motivation. To the victim, does it really matter if the rapist was motivated by lust rather than by a sick desire to change his/her sexuality? By classifying different “types” of rape and by extension, assigning different sentences for what is essentially the same crime, are we not introducing yet another shade of grey into a conversation that needs to be
completely black and white? Responding to my question by email, Melanie Nathan, the Commissioner of the Marin Human Rights Commission said:
“These are woman who might not otherwise have been raped and these men may not have committed the rape but for the vengeance factor of the woman being a lesbian and the anger it invokes in the man. The idea of a lesbian – a woman not needing a man- often emasculates a man and so he is proving his power over her… it goes to the core of who she is. Of a perpetrator purporting to control her sexual orientation under the false notion, perpetuated by religious and cultural dogma, that she can be changed… I believe that because of rampant homophobia in some cultures and especially now in Africa and SA, it must be prosecuted as a specific hate crime.”
I believe that making distinctions based on the motive of a specific rape muddies the waters. All rapes are about the subjugation of women and men trying to assert their physical and sexual superiority over women. Yes, being a lesbian (a population already living through social discrimination) certainly adds a layer of “motivation” for these rapists, but so does wearing a short skirt, or being flirtatious, or rejecting a man’s advances. In South Africa, 20% of men admit to intercourse with a woman without consent and 78% of these men admit to their first rape before the age of 20. Perhaps lesbians are more at risk than heterosexual women, but with those statistics, is that difference in risk significant enough to justify a separate class of rape and the subsequent clouding of the conversation and dilution of law enforcement that comes with it? There is no such thing as ‘corrective rape’; there is nothing about rape that is correct.
‘Corrective’ rapists are motivated by the idea that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’. We should be teaching African boys (and shouting it from every rooftop) that every rape is inarguably unnatural, that it forfeits the perpetrator of their membership in the human family and is worthy of maximum punishment.
There. i said it. 