Please stop.

On Wednesday the #rapevideo went viral in South Africa. Why? A 17-year old girl ( it has not been confirmed if she is mentally ill or not) was raped in a field by seven men aged between 14 and 20. The girl had been missing since the 21 of March.

Several aspects here are disturbing and all the news reports don'r provide the same information:

 -  why did the mother not report her daughter missing?
       - the CNN report states that she did, but that the police did not open up a missing person's report. Why??

 - what does it matter if she is mentally ill or not? Does it make her more of a victim? Or less?


The girl was found only after students at school showed each other the video on their cellphones and a mother discovered her daughter watching it. Instead of going to the police, the mother took the story to the Daily Mail, a tabloid with the highest amount of readers, who then alerted the police. Why would she not go to the police herself?

This whole story is horrible and highlights not only a corrupt system, but a break with morality in society. Where are the father's of these boys? Have they not taught their children to have any respect for women? And the children at school watching the girl being raped, or the requests on Twitter for the link to the video? How come no one spoke up? What does it say about us as people when we can watch a girl getting raped for 10 minutes, when we can hear her pleading for them to stop? How could the young men even think of such a thing? And laugh at her, egging each other on, ignoring how they are hurting her?

I just do not understand it. People are weak and have lost all sense of what is right and wrong. Many South Africans pride themselves on their Christianity, but to me, a non-believer, it seems that they see it as going to church on a Sunday to socialise and not actually to stick to the 10 commandments.

This rape just shows that there is a blackness at the centre of our country that is sucking the youth in and they are not being taught by their parents, their families, their friends, or anyone in their lives, what is good, what is pure and true.

Look, I sound like some moralising bitch sitting on a high horse because I am "safe" behind my white skin and my black gates and walls and alarm systems. But the fact is, a woman gets raped every 26 seconds in South Africa, and only about 10% gets reported because the women feel ashamed of something they had no control over. And it's not even just women. Men get raped, too, but the shame is even bigger, even more engrossing, because "a man cannot be harmed".

What bullshit. When they broke in, they told me they would not rape me. At that moment, I thought "Duh. I am certain you won't. No one would. One does not harm others".

But now, after this report of 14-year-olds involved ( yes yes, peer pressure and all that, but you make your own choices), I don't know. As I said, there is a black hole of immorality that keeps expanding exponentially and I think that as a society, one must make a conscious choice to somehow teach what is good again.

There are basic things one accepts, a basic code to live by, but somehow, here, the respect for individual life has been lost, and if that is gone, what remains?


Read this M&G editorial.
  

6 minutes

I am in my room, watching an episode of Pretty Little Liars when I hear a terrible bang coming from the kitchen. I go to check, wondering what our cleaning lady has broken now, a bit irritated that I have to get up now. I hear male voices but figure the garden service has arrived and is outside. Then I see them through the cut-out arch-shape in the wall : four black men, my age. We are separated by bricks and yet not. One of them was huge, towering above the others, with a red streak in his one eye. They were coming from the front door, I was standing on the steps, I see my dogs wandering around looking confused. I thought: “Why is the gardening team in the house?” But that red in his eye made me afraid, and something clicked, I knew something was not right. So I started shouting, telling them to “Get the fuck out of my house”, wasting time when instead I could have closed the slam-lock gate where I was standing. They start shouting at each other, the one comes running towards me. I realise this too late and I am too slow, one of them forces his arm between the gate.  I am not stronger than him, I give up trying to force it shut. I cannot remember his face, he is shorter than I am, wearing a white shirt and cargo pants. He does not look like a robber, but then again, what does a robber look like. Maybe the group are quite successful at it, judging from their wardrobe.

He tells me to go lie on the bed. Not to worry. They won’t rape me. I thought, “What a weird thing to say. Of course you won’t rape me. Why would you. No one does that. That’s not normal.” I keep asking where Rosina, our cleaning lady, is. If she is ok. And then I inform him I’ll lie on my own bed, in my room, further down the hallway, remembering that my cellphone is under my cushions. I just walk towards my room. He tells me to lie down and put the blanket over my head, but he keeps asking me where things are and I have to take it off to answer. They rummage around in the rooms but they aren’t very thorough. I try to keep them away from my mother’s room and from the safe. I am afraid that then they’d want the key and I am not willing to give it. But how well do I lie. While they are away I try to dial something on my phone. I cannot think of who to call. 911? This is not America. 10111? They won’t come. I hear the robbers coming back.

They keep asking for jewellery. I point mine out, but he only sees beads and no worth. He shouts at me, asking for the real jewellery. Tss. Little man.  I give him my box, but it does not contain anything of more worth. Someone already grabbed my laptop, ipod, external hard drive and handbag with my wallet in. He starts going towards my cupboards. The alpha is there. They cannot take the camera. No. So I get up and give him the laptop bag, shifting the camera bag behind my clothes.

He leaves. I hide the camera more, afraid he’ll come back. But I hear the front door slam shut, I see a whitish sedan drive away through a hole in the wall. They tell me later it was a BMW. Stealing in style.  I start looking for Rosina. She is at the back of the house, getting ready to leave. She did not notice a thing. Later I wonder how she could not have noticed four men breaking in?! I ignore her and radio the robbery in. Then I push the panic button. Then I phone my mother.

Louis and the garden team arrive. I lose composure, start crying. But I am inside, I am separated by the bars of the front gate. I am in prison at home. Everyone arrives at the same time. The garden team go about mowing the lawn, as if nothing had happened. It is weird. The police arrive. The security company arrives. I have to retell the story over and over and over and over and over, becoming numb to it. The police officer is a moron. I am apologetic in describing the robbers. Black. Young. My age. Well-dressed. Ag shame. Surely they did not expect anyone to be home. It was my fault: I should not have been home as it was a week of holidays, normally I would have been at the university at that time.

Everyone leaves, I take Rosina to the taxi rank. In the car I cannot stop crying. My face feels as though it is not part of me, as if I am watching myself feel.  It is the violation that affects me, not so much the things that were taken. Sure, I will miss my laptop. Sure my iPod was a week old. Sure, my grandmother’s jewellery is now gone. But it is the intrusion into your home that I cannot accept. We have laser beams and security gates and alarm systems, we live in our own little concentration camps, but here people want to get in, not out, and they manage it. Easily. In six minutes they destroyed all sense of safety. People are pitying. Shame. Poor you. But nothing happened really, hey?! They didn’t hurt you.

I have to replace my ID document, get a new driver’s licence, cancel by bank cards, get a new student card and all those little club cards that stores offer for free. The Monday at the university the security refuses to let me park in the student parking because I don’t have a student card, even though she knows me and I drive the only left-hand drive Mercedes around. I get so frustrated and inform her that she is a fucking dumb bitch, and waiting at the robot I again cry uncontrollably. The car guard nearby wanted to harass me, but I see him turning around quickly.

In my English class I am astounded that the entire row I am sitting in has been affected by crime. Literally everyone has been somehow shook by crime. But I am ok. And not. It is this duality of knowing everything is fine, that I have life, and that it could have been worse, opposed to thinking: how was it my fault? What could I have done? How could I not have fought more?

After a while I start moving on, thinking I will not live here forever. Strange how one’s country can become so despised. I am desperate for things to get better. I assume that they had to rob to feed their families. That they come from a place of poverty. As a result I want to impose education on every car guard and beggar. I want to hand out magazines and newspapers and say : “Read! Learn! Make your life better than this!”

I wrote that on October 1, 2010. Today, someone again tried to break into our house. Luckily they only got past the garage and my mom could press the panic button and radio it in. People in Europe and the States do not realise the extent of fear, the contradicting halves of living here. South Africa is a beautiful country, and every time we drive down to the coast I marvel again at the grandeur of creation, at what a privilege it is to be surrounded by this. But human nature defeats nature here. Power has corrupted our population and many still feel entitled to something, feel like the government now owes them for having suffered at the hands of apartheid. It is understandable to want to profit for having been denied freedom and dignity.

But to me it is also incomprehensible how my generation, a supposedly post-racist generation, does not have the drive to advance society and rather sits, palms cupped, demanding what they have not earned. By talking to older people it is clear that the youth of today do not know what it is to work and what our parents and grandparents had to fight for. We ignore education and human rights in favour of owning the newest gadgets and being able to spend the most.  I feel like there needs to be a fundamental change in the way we acknowledge the existence and the rights of humans, animals and nature. We must come to realise that a decent life, a life without fear, a protected life, is what everyone is entitled to, not gluttony avarice and wrath.

"Entitled" to rape

In last Monday's Pretoria News ( their site is currently under construction so I can't give you the direct link to the article, but if you have October 24th's paper by any chance it is on page 5 under "Study finds motive for rape worldwide") Esther Lewis reports that in South Africa, 70 % of men who have raped someone felt "entitled" to do so.

How does anyone feel entitled to harm another? ENTITLED???? How must your mind work? How can you not respect another human being enough?

Even worse, the research ( done by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative) revealed that most rapes of girls under the age of 15 and gang rapes are done out of boredom and "for fun". Raping for fun? For fun??????

The article further states that 17 % of the men that rape were raped themselves, that 45 % said their mothers were rarely at home and that 72% said their fathers weren't at home very often either. Furthermore, 3/4 of those interviewed said they had raped someone before their 20th birthday.

I was watching Special Assignment or Fokus or something on SABC once and they reported that 50% of South African children grow up without their fathers. Now I wonder if this can link to the 56 272 people that were raped between April 2010 and March 2011. That would be round 154 people per day and 6 people per hour.

The article states that boys "need to be socialised at school and community level, and taught what it meant to be a boy or man, and to gravitate away from violence". But should not a parent, a father, take responsibility for their son or daughter and teach them right from wrong? I think the high level of single-mother households and absentee fathers is partially to blame. Who are we to learn a moral code from when there is no one to teach us?

Perhaps it also depends on the level of education and the support from people around one that the child receives. My father left when I was around 11 and my mother had to find a job very quickly. However, my sister and I turned out rather well because we always knew that she was working so much to provide for us and that in turn our responsibility was to work hard at our education. One need not be rich to feel accomplished in life.

According to the article, most rapists had been exposed to childhood trauma. Does trauma define a person? Does it either bury you or make you rise above it? I don't know. Mine was not very traumatic.
But I believe there must exist a basic humanity in all of us. There must be something pure that is corrupted by circumstance. I don't understand how we cannot see each other as equal. By respecting you am I not also respecting myself?

I don't think one can blame anyone for one's own choices. I am excluding mental instabilities and psychotic problems here, but in the case of people of sound mind and body everyone is responsible for their own actions. Sure, life beats some up more than others, but ultimately, you choose your own reaction.

Rape

          Adrienne Rich

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.
You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,
on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:
he has access to machinery that could kill you.
He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,
his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud
from between his unsmiling lips.

And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,
the maniac's sperm still greasing your thighs,
your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess
to him, you are guilty of the crime
of having been forced.

And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family
whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,
his hand types out the details
and he wants them all
but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:
he has taken down your worst moment
on a machine and filed it in a file.
He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;
he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away;
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,
will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

Increase your vocabulary

My friend Ilse gave me a book to read : "Little Ice Cream Boy" by Jacques Pouw. Sounds quite innocent, doesn't it. Or maybe slightly pedo. But it is none of the two - it retells the story of of an Apartheid era assassin, now sitting in maximum security prison and serving three life sentences.
Even though the book is billed as being a novel, I understand it to be based on the life of Ferdi Barnard, who killed the academic David Webster, and was part of the Civil Co-Operation Bureau (CCB).

The book reminds me of Al Lovejoy's "Acid Alex" because both tell real-life stories about people and their actions that I could never have imagined. Both Gideon Goosen, the main character in Little Ice Cream Boy, and Alex from Acid Alex live in a world I would not be able to understand: violence, drugs, sex and rape intertwine to form the basis of their seedy existence. Life and death means nothing, it all revolves around the next hit, be it snorting coke up your nose or beating someone almost to death. Where does such violence come from?

Gideon kills a brothel-owner because he got the prossie Gideon likes pregnant. But not only does he beat him to a pulp, he empties his entire magazine into him. He flies into a rage and enjoys hurting people physically. He even tells of how killing someone is the greatest aphrodisiac.

I know this world exists, but I cannot imagine it. A world where it is normal to spend your weekend in a brothel banging under-age girls, smuggled in from who knows where, while you have a wife and kids at home. And then, Monday morning, you return to your job as a police officer , having been absolved of your crimes by chilling in the church for an hour on Sundays.

The idea of killing someone is so absurd to me. How can you? I can comprehend self-defence or it being an accident, but planning on doing it, I don't know how anyone could do that. Stalking someone like prey and then blasting them with a shotgun when they leave for work. And then just tuning around and calmly walking away. It is very strange to think people exist to whom life is not sacred.

The book was a page-turner but also very difficult because I could not relate to the main character at all : yes he comes from an abusive family, yes he has dodgy friends, but how can every choice you make be wrong. I mean, really, at some point you have to say to yourself : I choose not to fuck up my life further. At the end Gideon tells his friend to turn state witness in order to save himself. This was the only scene where he seemed human, because he is willing to sacrifice himself for his friend. But on the other hand, Goosen was going down in any case, so it probably didn't really matter.

Also, the novel vastly increased my Afrikaans dirty vocabulary:


groeps-woeps : group sex
bosbefok: people who suffer from post-traumatic stress after having fought in the Angola/Namibia border war
draadtrek : masturbate
fok-kop:  I would have thought it to be a fuck-head, but apparently its a fuck-hill
gabba: a friend
genotgrot=slymslot= well, hmm, let's say a woman's lady-parts
pomping= procreating
sif: I always took it to just mean disgusting, but it comes from syphilis. who knew?!
kleinkoppie: male sexual organ

Read the book. Not only will you be able to swear like a skewetiet spoedvark  but the story is actually quite interesting as well.


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