Child rape: the scourge of the new SA

As someone who works with traumatized children on a daily basis I can tell you that South Africa is headed for an eruption of cosmic proportions. Childhood sexual trauma takes years of intensive therapy to overcome. The lasting symptoms of childhood sexual trauma that are left unchecked range from depression and hopelessness to schizophrenia. Now combine a growing population of young people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the availibility of illicit drugs and the prescence of terrorism and you have yourself a recipe for societal disaster.

Then of course there's AIDS. Obviously if the number of news HIV infections far exceeds the number of people treated in SA, that country will be on the fast track to causing it's own genocide.

Here's the article:

At least 50 children per day are raped in South Africa, even as the country struggles with one of the highest HIV and Aids infection rates in the world. That is according to the official figures.

But specialist groups say these statistics grossly underestimate the true scale of the phenomenon depicted in police reports. Regular newspaper reports recount girls as young as five being raped, sometimes by boys who are barely in their teens.

South Africa has become notorious for the number of rape cases.

Lambrecht said one explanation was the country's violent past
According to Captain Percy Morokane, 40 percent of rape victims or 20 000 a year are under the age of 18. But according to organisations such as Rape Crisis, the total of all rapes reported, more than 52 000 a year, is far from the real figure which they put at more than a million.

Luke Lambrecht, head of Johannesburg's Teddy Bear Clinic, says that 91 percent of perpetrators are people who know the child.

Of them, "about 20 percent are people acting in the capacity of father in other words, the mother's boyfriend, the mother's living partner, the stepfather or the biological father," Lambrecht said.

"And another 20 percent are juveniles under 18 years old other children which is another worry."

"We have younger and younger offenders," Lambrecht said.

'But our country is still extremely traditional, so few men are able to take on that role'
"We have heard of seven-year-old boys who have attempted to sodomise other boys."

Lambrecht said one explanation was the country's violent past under the puritanical and repressive apartheid regime of white minority rule, coupled with the influx of sexually explicit material that followed its demise in 1994.

Parents were embarrassed to talk about sex to their children, who did not understand why they could not act on what they see, he said. And the HIV and Aids pandemic, which affects one adult in five in South Africa, links sex with death, an even more taboo subject. Other factors are the crowded housing conditions of many poorer people, living in one-roomed shacks of corrugated iron and cardboard, where violence and sexual promiscuity are common.

Social worker Linda Smith said: "Children are sexualised far earlier because of the lack of boundaries and poor living conditions, being exposed to sexual activities and family violence."

"People all live on top of one another, there is a lot of sexual abuse," Lambrecht said, adding that another big issue was poor maternal care.

Pediatrician Lorna Jacklin, one of the founders of the Teddy Bear Clinic, agreed, saying that "the only way to protect the children is educating the mothers".

A typical mother is "a young woman who has no skills, no resources, living in isolation, so disempowered that she is not able to protect her child", Jacklin said.

"The level of education of men is also important," said Lambrecht.

"If they take care of their children, they are less likely to hurt them.

"But our country is still extremely traditional, so few men are able to take on that role and violence is still a way of solving the problems whatever they are." Sapa-AFP