Posted on 11/17/2001 2:54:50 PM PST by blam
SA's culture of sexual violence 'endemic'
November 17 2001 at 07:31PM
The recent spate of child rapes were not isolated events but were rooted deep in the country's culture of violence, the non-governmental organisation for Community Information, Empowerment and Transparency (CIET) said in Johannesburg.
According to the CIET researcher Professor Neil Andersson, who conducted a social audit of sexual violence in southern Johannesburg, one in every three girls aged 15-18 suffered sexual harassment at school.
The social audit, which involved more than 27 000 youths, found that one in every 20 school girls aged 15 to 18 years had been raped in the year prior to the survey.
Many male youths had also been sexually abused. Male and female youth were at almost the same risk of unwanted sexual touching or verbal abuse.
They had no right to avoid sexual abuse "If the frequency of sexual abuse of children was shocking, the opinions expressed by schoolchildren about sexual violence revealed a dangerous and destructive culture of violence," Andersson said.
Eight out of every ten boys interviewed said women who were raped "asked for it" and two out of every ten said they thought women enjoyed being raped.
"More surprising than the views of boys were those of the girls, who had internalised the daily risk of sexual violence as a set of disturbing attitudes and practices," Andersson said.
Only 2 percent of adult women in the same communities thought they had no right to avoid sexual abuse, but 12 percent of school-going girls believed they had no right to avoid sexual abuse.
More than one half of the school-going respondents said forcing sex with someone you know was not sexual violence.
Social audit covered schools and communities "Deputy president Jacob Zuma has announced he will host a moral summit early next year. The question is what this will do about the culture that produces such extreme behaviour as the rape of a nine-month-old baby Nand the sexualisation of violence against children and women throughout the country," Andersson said.
A moral summit may be a first and necessary step for government to show it was beginning to take sexual violence seriously, but it also had to address the culture of sexual violence, he said.
"Communities urgently need material and technical support for local efforts to combat sexual violence. They need to know what has worked to reduce the problem in other places and they need to know how their own efforts add up to prevent it," he said.
The CIET social audit covered schools and communities in a multi-ethnic cross section of South African society.
The audit, conducted in collaboration with the local government and with support and original data from the South Africa Police Service, gave rise to a number of community-based interventions against sexual violence.
These included a local politician creating a regular forum where mothers and daughters could discuss sexuality, a school principal in Orange Farm who arranged for counselling to be available for learners and a guidance teacher who went beyond the call of duty to improve communication between teachers and learners.
"Even in the highly-fractured communities of south Johannesburg and Louisvale in the Northern Cape," Andersson said, "people declared their revulsion in this kind of sexual violence and their desire to develop their own solutions to it". - Sapa
Has anyone done an audit for the Record?? HMMMMMMMMMMM?
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