31% of South African Men Are Rapists
From the Guardian...
(Professor Rachel) Jewkes and her colleagues (on the Medical Research Council) interviewed a representative sample of 1,738 men in South Africa's Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.Of those surveyed, 28% said they had raped a woman or girl, and 3% said they had raped a man or boy. Almost half who said they had carried out a rape admitted they had done so more than once, with 73% saying they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.
The study, which had British funding, also found that men who are physically violent towards women are twice as likely to be HIV-positive.
Only 7% of reported rapes are estimated to lead to a conviction.
A report published by the trade union Solidarity earlier this month said that one child is raped in South Africa every three minutes, with 88% of rapes going unreported. It found that levels of child abuse in South Africa are increasing rapidly.
Some of this is old news, and as the BBC reported in 2002...
A woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped, than learning how to read.During a recent parliamentary debate on child abuse in South Africa, it was reported that there has been a 400% increase in the sexual violence against children over the past decade.
And meanwhile, the hodgepodge of laws governing rape in South Africa is slowly reformed...
South African lawmakers Tuesday approved major reforms to the country's rape laws, including extending the definition of rape to include men.Among other changes, it equalizes treatment of male and female victims and labels many more types of assaults, including forced oral sex, as "rape." Previously, forced anal penetration of men or boys was prosecuted as an "indecent act" and given much lighter sentencing.
A man convicted of raping a 9-year-old girl in 2004 appealed to the high court, citing evidence that found she had been anally, but not vaginally, penetrated. The court ruled May 10 that under the laws then prevailing the defendant could only be seen to have committed indecent assault and sent his sentence back to a lower court for review.
In the Congo, too.
http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/category/congo-blog-topic/rape-congo
June 18, 2009 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for posting that link, and I don't mean to downplay the ongoing nightmare in the Eastern Congo and elsewhere in that unfortunate country, but still..
These numbers from South Africa were astounding to me, and that's why I looked for some confirmation outside the time-frame of the MRC study. My first impression was that it had to be a statistical freak.
Sure, it's just a quantitative difference from so many other countries where rape is more or less tolerated, but...
This is the sort of thing I can understand in a war-zone like the Congo, or maybe some hopelessly poor African nation like Burundi, with a GDP per capita of $100, but it really didn't fit my idea of South Africa, with a GDP per capita of $9700.
June 18, 2009 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, we're talking about a nation within a nation for the most part. If you take a sampling from Capetown or Durban, it probably looks a lot different.
June 18, 2009 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right you are, but the nation of the poor is always a nation within a nation, and in the USA some estimates of the percent of women in high-crime cities like Detroit who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted are as high as 50%.
But the national figure is probably more like 20%, according to Justice Department estimates which include a provision for unreported rapes, and NOW doesn't dispute that figure.
Obviously I'm not claiming that rape isn't a very serious problem in the USA, or that the figures from South Africa don't reflect disproportionate violence in shanty-towns, and other impoverished zones.
But still...
The numbers from South Africa are weird.
June 18, 2009 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're mising the point. The study was a sampling from 2 of the 9 South African Provinces, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. The Guardian is wrong to extrapolate that data, then claim it is representative for all of South Africa. I'm not saying the estimate is right or wrong; only that the methodology is extremely suspect.
June 18, 2009 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your usual half-witted "contribution," chump!
PseudoCyAnts did so much research about the MRC study that he linked... a primitive map of South Africa!
Wow!
But if that chump had bothered to read so much as a summary of Professor Jewkes' research, he might have noticed that the survey was extremely well-designed, and when PseudoCyAnts claims that "the methodology is extremely suspect," all it means is...
PseudoCyAnts knows exactly as much about demographic analysis as a sheep-turd.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the South African researchers overlooked important regional considerations in their demographic analysis, and the semi-literate PseudoCyAnts is just blowing smoke out his sorry little butt, as usual.
June 18, 2009 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
But just in case anyone takes the trouble to add up all the numbers exactly, I might as well preemptively point out that there is some rounding up involved in my figure of 31%.
Since 46% of men who reported one rape also admitted to multiple rapes, the predicted overlap between men who raped boys and the rest of the population in the survey (at a first approximation) might account for about 1.4% of the sample, and a reasonable figure for the total, plugging in the exact figures of 27.6% reporting raping a woman or girl, and 2.9% for boys, would be 27.6% plus 1.5% equals 29.1%.
But it's also true that raping boys isn't quite as socially acceptable as raping women and girls in South Africa, and probably accounted for a certain amount of differential under-reporting.
June 18, 2009 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Except the penalty for raping boys (anal penetration) is or was much less than vaginal penetration, which is why they in the end harmonize their laws.
But yes, a 33% rapist rate of whatever population is pretty horrid to contend with. Congo + South Africa would probably make us lose it completely.
June 18, 2009 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right you are again, and your habit of making intelligent modulations of whatever I post is almost as annoying as trash-posts by... whoever.
But the social stigma attached to homosexual acts both legal and illegal in South Africa is out of all proportion with the legal penalties attached, and South Africa still ranks as one of the most homophobic countries in the world.
June 18, 2009 11:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
In other words, in two of 9 provinces. I suppose one could do a state survey of less than 20% of it's area that contained "rural, urban and (big) city" and depending on the area might come up with some very predictable results. I am so sorry simple math seems to evade you, but perhaps one day you'll open that peabrain, and act human, rather than this pathetic wannabe you assume at TPM.
June 18, 2009 10:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, please do shut off comments, as you're a wannabe bully, too. You can dish it up fine, but your blue pic turns yellow when you get it back.
I have found the best way to deal with a child that bites, is to bite them back.
Looks like I'm right, so far.
June 18, 2009 10:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bwakfat and PseudoCyAnts inevitably appear on my diaries with whatever nasty comments they can dream up, based on zero research and zero understanding of demographics or statistics, or anything else, as far as I can determine, beyond the sort of "everything is in my head" self-assurance that's all too common in sheltered workshops.
In her summary of the research, Professors Jewkes mentions that "the sample was drawn by Statistics South Africa."
Who are they?
Or more to the point, who is Statistics South Africa compared to bwakfat and PseudoCyAnts?
Statistics South Africa is a rather large sampling and analysis outfit which also provides statistical analysis of population and poverty (A team of academics and researchers drawn from Stats SA, Oxford University, and the Human Science Research Council has developed an approach to the measurement of poverty in South Africa which takes into account issues relating to income and material deprivation, employment deprivation, health deprivation, education deprivation, and the quality of the environment in which people live), commercial agriculture (preliminary results of the Census of Commercial Agriculture), construction (monthly and annual building statistics, based on sample surveys of building activities financed by the private sector as reported by local government institutions), electricity, gas, and water ( financial results and details of income and purchases from the 2006 Large Sample Survey of the electricity, gas and water supply industry), mining (indices of the physical volume of mining production and the total value of mineral sales according to mining divisions and mineral groups on a monthly basis), and so on.
Statistics South Africa annually publishes dozens of different reports for a variety of commercial and institutional clients, and aren't they just exactly the sort of outfit who would make an elementary mistake which could be detected without any further research or reflection by a couple of clowns like Pseudo and bwakfat, who have absolutely no idea why this sort of survey is almost always conducted in clusters instead of completely randomized dots.
If I had a reason to believe that Professor Jewkes sample was biased, I would look at the details more closely, and it wouldn't be because I was completely ignorant about the methodology of large surveys, and mistook standard practice for a simple-minded methodological failure, like bwakfat and Pseudo.
June 18, 2009 11:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now the RSA has elected Jacob Zuma as their President. An accused rapist who at his trial testified that if a Zulu woman dresses provocatively, she wants sex, and that it is the duty of a Zulu man to satisfy her. Oh, and he knew she was HIV positive, but he took a shower afterwards, so he's fine.
So we go from Mandela to Mbeki, and to Zuma....That's kinda like watching evolution in reverse.
June 18, 2009 1:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't find a link, or a video, but you reminded of one of the truly sublime episodes in the modern history of Africa.
Nelson Mandela appeared at an African "summit" about ten years ago, and there were seven-star generals galore, and fantastical costumes with no ethnic basis anywhere except the vanity of one tin-pot dictator or another, and then suddenly there was Nelson Mandela in his usual flowered shirt and tan pants, looking down from the podium at so many miserable clowns, and he said...
"You are the trash of Africa!"
I was sitting in an airport watching CNN, and I didn't stop cheering until they called security!
"You are the trash of Africa!"
I wish I could make that the sound-track for the rest of their lives!
June 18, 2009 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Would a man rape a women or a child if the women or the child could kick his ass? Any reasonable person will arrive at the answer that's appropriate and right. Men rape because they have the power to. Closer to home , here in Minnesota , I can remember in the early seventies and around the University of Minnesota , which is my Alma Mater , men were being found that had been assaulted by a group of women and they had had their penises cut off. I guarantee you if women could unite and cut off some "dicks" in South Africa it would go a long way to "establish" control now wouldn't it.
June 18, 2009 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately for so many guys with masochistic fantasies, those penis-chopping female gangs in Minneapolis are just an urban legend.
June 18, 2009 7:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Most women are raped by people they know - their husbands, their "friends", hangers on, people they're attracted to. There is no vigilante group coming to their rescue.
June 18, 2009 7:31 PM | Reply | Permalink