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We
arrive in Durban, South Africa, on a sunny Sunday morning, and land
in the midst of horror.
Just the day before, World AIDS Day, a 5-month-old girl had been
brutally raped by two men. The child was a victim of a warped belief
that has fueled an unprecedented rise in baby rapes in this country.
They're
calling it the AIDS myth, a "new low" for South Africa,
said Kelly Hatfield, director of People Opposed to Women Abuse.
"A lot of it has to do with the myth that a man will be cured
of AIDS by having sex with a virgin," Hatfield told the Cape
Times.
"How much more virginal can you get than a baby?"
The newspapers provide the sordid details: the mother had been arrested
for neglect after the men, 17 and 24, raped her infant so severely
that the pediatric surgeon at a Johannesburg hospital said the child
could be facing a year of operations before being able "to
lead a normal life."
But what constitutes normal here?
Rape and violent crime are endemic, poverty and hopelessness rampant.
This is our crude introduction to a country of great physical beauty,
big cities and good roads, torn by shocking crimes and a terrible,
ravaging disease.
We have come to South Africa, photographer Nance Ackerman and I,
to interview women for a book on activists. We have traveled all
over the world on this project, but nothing has prepared us for
the brutality of these rapes that we discover, as we read and talk
to people, are being perpetrated against younger and younger victims.
The local newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, cites recent statistics:
21,000 cases of violence against children in the past year in South
Africa, a rise of 10 per cent from the previous year.
The South African Institute of Race Relations claims 58 children
daily become victims of rape or attempted rape. Half of those cases,
police sources say, are under 7 years of age.
Over the next few days, dozens of children are reported to have
been raped or abused, among them a one-year old, raped by her father
and two of his friends when her mother went shopping.
South Africa is reeling from high unemployment, poverty, drug abuse
and petty crimes. But most of all, the country is facing an insidious
and powerful threat - HIV. The South African government estimates
4.7 million people have the virus, and of that number 2.5 million
are women and 110,000 defined as "babies."
It's this disease, if it continues unchecked, that will reduce the
life expectancy in that country to age 41 by 2009, when 16 per cent
of the population will be infected.
And it's this disease that is ostensibly the reason for this unprecedented
number of rapes, which came to public attention a
month earlier when 9-month old Baby Tshepang in the Northern Cape
was raped and sodomized by six men ranging in age from 22 to 66.
To protect her identity, the little girl had been named Tshepang,
meaning "have hope." But apart from public protests and
lots of outrage, there isn't much here to have hope about.
Two years ago, counselors from the Childline organization talked
about the rape cases they had seen and how the community's lack
of understanding of AIDS was contributing to them.
"The belief is that the cleanliness and pureness of the child
will strip the virus away," said Stephenie Shutt, a counselor
in the
Western Cape. "Women in the community are telling us that both
girls and boys are being raped because of this belief."
- - -
The prevalence of these crimes have been attributed to powerlessness
and anger, both residual effects of apartheid, and to
the brutality and violence endemic to this society.
While revered South African Nelson Mandela and some government ministers
have publicly rejected the AIDS "myth," few have spoken
out more eloquently about the roots of this abuse than Canada's
own Stephen Lewis, appointed last summer as the United Nations secretary-general's
special envoy for AIDS in Africa.
In an interview with ????E?CBC radio just after his appointment,
Lewis linked the disease, the treatment of women and this baby-rape
crisis.
One of the sad realities of AIDS, Lewis said, "is that if women's
sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to
say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or
predatory behaviour generally, then you would have a disease in
Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic."
Raping baby girls is a giant step, even for abusers, but it's less
of a leap if you consider that South Africa, according to Human
Rights Watch, has the highest rate of violence against women in
the world.
If they manage to avoid rape when they're young children, little
girls here have another threat to face: the school. A recent report
issued by the Medical Research Council in Pretoria discloses that
one-third of all South African girls raped before the age of 15
were attacked by their teachers.
"The world needs to wake up to the fact that schools are a
major site of sexual harassment and rape for children," said
the council's Rachel Jewkes.
In the townships, says Childline director Joan van Niekerk, some
youths "specifically target virgin girls and separate them
physically from their peer groups and gang rape them. These girls
are intimidated and rarely report the rape because of their fear
of reprisal on either themselves or their family."
And no wonder. Eight out of every 10 boys interviewed in a social
audit of 27,000 youths said women who were raped "asked for
it."
More than half of the school-going respondents said forcing sex
with someone you know was not sexual violence.
- - -
Then there's the other way that children in South Africa are victimized,
although this scourge does not target them by gender:
the United Nations reports that South Africa is now home to 1.2
million children orphaned because of AIDS.
According to Ally Cassiem of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund,
these figures will double in five years.
Many of these children have been left with no family at all to care
for them because even in a culture that nurtures the extended family,
the burden of these losses are too great for many elderly grandparents.
A place like Agape, founded in 1999 by HIV counselor Zodwa Mqadi,
is one of the few chances for abandoned children.
We are here to see Mqadi; she's one of the women activists we're
profiling. She started the orphanage on a couple of dusty acres
in Waterfall, just outside Durban, after a dozen years as an HIV
counselor and a trip to Uganda that changed her life.
"I saw the graves in Uganda," Mqadi said, "seven
from one family alone. And I knew that was coming to South Africa."
Fifty children live at Agape, some already orphaned and others in
the process of losing their last parent. They are brought by
volunteers or social workers and live here without any funding from
the government.
We meet Siwaphiwe, 11, whose mother is dead and father is dying;
3-year-old Sabelo and Sifundo, 5, who was picked up last year by
the road, sleeping in a car tire. That had been his bed since his
parents died.
The children call her "gogo," Zulu for granny, and like
a loving parent Mqadi hopes to give them a chance to have a childhood,
she says, and skills so they can stand on their own. "We say,
'Don't look after your family alone. Look after all the children.'
"
If only the rapists in South Africa could understand that.
Donna Nebenzahl's E-mail address is
dnebenzahl@thegazette.southam.ca
dnebenzahl@thegazette.canwest.com
Womankind,
with essays by Donna Nebenzahl and photographs by
Nance Ackerman, will be published in autumn 2002 by Raincoast Books.
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