Posted on 01/24/2002 7:47:10 PM PST by Lancey Howard
Teachers Commit Many S.Africa Child Rapes - Study
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - A third of all child rapes in South Africa are committed by school teachers, researchers said in a new report on sexual violence against young girls.
"The world needs to wake up to the fact that schools are a major site of sexual harassment and rape for children," said Dr. Rachel Jewkes of the Medical Research Council in Pretoria.
Jewkes and her colleagues found that 33 percent of South African women raped before the age of 15 were attacked by teachers, another 21 percent by relatives and a similar number by strangers or acquaintances.
The national survey interviewed 11,735 women between the ages of 15 and 49. Jewkes found that 153 women, or 1.3 percent, said they had been raped before the age of 15.
Of those, 15 percent were attacked between the ages of five and nine. Eighty-five percent were attacked between the ages of 10 and 14.
"Our findings confirm that rape of girls, especially in school, is a substantial public health problem in South Africa," Jewkes said.
"Our data have highlighted it in South Africa but it is occurring in many other countries and it is a message which I don't think has got through to governments," she said in a telephone interview.
Some 21,000 cases of child rape were reported to police in South Africa last year. Activists say countless thousands of others were never reported.
South Africa has been rocked by a recent spate of baby rapes thought to be linked to a myth that sex with a virgin will cure a man of AIDS.
The nation is at the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, with an estimated one in nine of the 45 million people in South Africa carrying the HIV virus.
The string of highly publicized cases of baby rapes led to an impassioned plea from South African President Thabo Mbeki for people to turn in the men who commit them.
Jewkes said her findings, published in the Lancet medical journal, reflect the way men in South Africa view women.
"There is also the view that raping women is not a very serious thing to do. This is reflected in the fact that until recently school teachers who had sex with girls didn't have any action taken against them," she said.
I don't know....
I could swear that just ten years ago South Africa was a civilized, industrial nation. But now its a third world sewer, with rampant crime, power outages, epidemic baby rapes, etc. I don't know what happened....can't figure it out.
It's a mystery.
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