Yeah and i'm saying they're not being accepted because these men are being taken to court when they're reported. I'm not saying it's perfect because a lot of it never gets reported, a lot of it never reaches the court, and a lot of it reaches the court and nothing happens. But at the end of the day, if I was a woman I'd rather live here than in the Sudan but hey I'm not a woman, so I guess I can't say things like that.

-Rudey

Ok, as a woman I can tell you I'm glad I don't live anywhere in the Middle East

I've been trying to hold my tongue on this one and not say anything but I wish you could see all of this from my point of view. My family is from the middle east, that's my background. Its bad enough that people point and think "terrorist" but now "rapist" is added to that list of derogatory adjectives.

Rape happens everywhere. Gang bangs happen here too. I'm not excusing or condoning these actions I just want you all to step back and think of what you're doing when you point the finger and blame a whole population or ethnicity. Every culture has its good and bad. Americans are far from perfect so please dont discriminate.

I've been out there, its not easy being a woman and I'm not Muslim, my parents are against the religion entirely. But it hurts me when the middle east = muslim terrorist and it hurts even more when people look down on me because of my background. I shouldnt have to apologize for an entire race.

Look around you, this country has its faults. We terrorize, we discriminate, people here get off on crimes all the time. Please dont be ignorant. So now go ahead and rip me to pieces, i know its coming....

Sorry, I won't rip you to pieces and I don't think anyone else will. I'm also middle eastern. At the end of the day, I think the culture of the middle east has been retarded and mutated into some awful. Trying to say this country also has its bad doesn't help much because so does every country - some countries are just worse than others.

But by anyone saying, it's a culture and leave it be what does that accomplish? Nobody is saying that Arabs are rapists. But when push comes to shove, women in most Arab countries have less rights and are often forced to go through things like this.

-Rudey

I was going for I didn't want to live in the middle east right now because of all the violence directed at Americans right there at the moment. No disrespect towards your culture was meant.

Here is another horrible story about the rape of children. My eyes were weepy after reading this. I don't think people like this can really be called human beings:

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...laudia+ford%22



In South Africa, 60 children a day are raped. Before she was a year old, this girl became one of them

No one here can explain why violence, especially sexual violence, is soout of control. As STEPHANIE NOLEN reports, the crisis -- especially the unique horror of infant rape -- has spoiled the hopes of the 'rainbow nation' 10 years after apartheid

By STEPHANIE NOLEN
Saturday, October 18, 2003 - Page F1


Claudia Ford has a story she tells her daughter, Princess, before bedtime.

"You're my special girl," she begins, and Princess squirms with delight. "Do you know why?" Ms. Ford asks. "Because I saw you in the hospital, and I said, 'Look at that special baby. I want to take her home with me.' "

Princess, an eagle-eyed two-year-old, loves the part about how she's special. And Ms. Ford tells her each night, in her calm and measured voice. But she is braced for the day when Princess will ask the natural question: "Why was I in the hospital?"

Princess was brought to the hospital by her biological mother on Dec. 2, 2001, with massive internal injuries. Horrified staff determined that her perineum had been cut open with a piece of a glass bottle and she had been raped repeatedly. It later emerged that her mother had been drunk and left her in a seedy hotel with two male acquaintances; she came home hours later to find the baby screaming and bleeding.

The surgeon who tried to repair the damage to the baby's genitals and digestive system later told Ms. Ford that he could hardly tell what he was doing, so massive was the trauma. "He said, 'I just sewed, did the best I could and prayed,' " Ms. Ford recalls. She heard about the five-month-old on the news, and went to the hospital with a group of others to visit the baby eight days later.

Princess's mother, who was still in a drunken daze when she brought the baby in, had disappeared; police were hunting for her and investigating the rape. Ms. Ford heard there were plans to discharge Princess to an orphanage. "I thought, 'No way. Not after what she's been through.' " And so at the age of 48, with her own sons already in their teens and 20s, she found herself mother to a massively traumatized infant.

Ms. Ford, an American-born development researcher who now teaches at Johannesburg's University of the Witswatersrand, has become something of an expert on the horrifying phenomenon of infant rape in the course of caring for Princess (who has had a final round of reconstructive surgery, tested negative for HIV after a six-week course of drugs, and is today a remarkably cheerful and well-adjusted toddler).

Ms. Ford speaks out on the issue because, she says, so many South African mothers cannot talk publicly about the sexual assault of their children.

Two rapes of babies were reported outside Cape Town this week, one of a nine-month-old, one of a girl just shy of 2. The nine-month-old baby has been dubbed Baby M. Her grandmother says she found her bloodied and screaming in her township shack. The mother had disappeared; a 35-year-old man appeared in court charged with the rape on Wednesday; the baby remains in hospital. Police are still investigating the rape of the two-year-old, who has been discharged from hospital.

The infant rapes make headlines here -- they are the most shocking examples of South Africa's epidemic levels of rape and other violent crime. But rapes and assaults on women and older children are now so common as to pass unremarked. There can be no question that something is terribly wrong.

It is 10 years since the end of apartheid, since the moment when newly democratic South Africa was held up as a beacon of hope to the world. In 1994, this country had the highest rate of rape in the world; that is still true today. South Africa also has the world's highest rate of child rape, 60 a day -- a 400-per-cent increase in reported assaults in the past eight years. Only 5 per cent of perpetrators are convicted.

Black South Africans never rose up in the mass rampage against whites that some predicted at the end of the apartheid years -- the rage has taken another form, the vast majority of it assaults by black men on black women and children, committed in squalid township shacks.

"It's not saying good things about the rainbow nation," says a grim Mike Earl-Taylor, a researcher in the MTN Centre for Crime Prevention at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. "It seriously tarnishes the image."

Government ministers, police, doctors and sociologists all say they are baffled by the gratuitous level of violence, especially sexual violence, that is the hallmark of crime here.

"What is causing the serious and violent crime?" Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula asked when the latest crime figures were released. "Why do people who go into a house to steal, then murder those who are in the house -- even the elderly, or children? This is the challenge we must give to our sociologists and our psychologists. I don't understand it."

Ask Mr. Earl-Taylor, who studies the perpetrators: "The actual psychological motivation for that is at the moment beyond our understanding."

Ask Tina Sideris, an expert on gender and violence. "Some of these things are in the realm of the incomprehensible."

Ask Ms. Ford, who soothed her gang-raped baby by holding her in front of a garden fountain for hours. "Sometimes you have to believe in absolute evil."

There are some theories about violent crime in South Africa. Mr. Nqakula outlined a handful: Overcrowding, rampant substance abuse and grim living conditions in the squatter camps and townships outside the cities; an extreme gap between rich and poor South Africans, the widest such polarization in the world; the proliferation of firearms in the past decade; the large presence of organized crime, including international drug cartels.

As well, everyone agrees that part of the reason rates have increased so sharply is that much more of the crime that has always existed is now being reported, as people gain faith in the police service. And South Africa's crime statistics are routinely compared with those of countries such as Canada, not its African neighbours such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is no such record-keeping.

But for South Africa, Mr. Nqakula's question is the crucial one: Why, for example, do car-jackers routinely execute the drivers of the Hondas they want, instead of simply pulling them out of the car? Why do burglars drag women around the house by their hair before raping them in front of their partners? Why do home invaders open the diapers of sleeping babies, looking for girls?

The minister blamed "the degeneration of moral fibres of our society." Last year, his government launched a national "moral regeneration campaign" in an effort to instill values in young people. "We believe that something is wrong within the fabric of our society," said deputy president Jacob Zuma, kicking off the effort. He spoke of this as an unexpected threat to South Africa's "hard-won freedom and democracy."

Prof. Sideris, of the Wits Institute on Social and Economic Research, begins her attempt at an explanation by noting that "this has always been a very violent society." Luke Lamprecht, who runs the Teddy Bear Clinic for Abused Children in Johannesburg, specifically cites the legacy of the war fought on South Africa's borders in the apartheid years, and of the unnamed civil war that raged here in the years up to the first democratic election in 1994, as the African National Congress and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party fought savagely for power.

He notes, too, that with that election, South Africa went from being one of the world's most restricted societies to one in which suddenly all kinds of things were permitted, a shift many people are still struggling with.

"But what sets us apart is the high level of sexual violence," says Superintendent André Neethling, provincial co-ordinator for the police family violence, child abuse and sexual offences unit in Gauteng, the province that contains Johannesburg. There were 52,000 reported rapes in South Africa from April, 2002, to April, 2003; police estimate that perhaps one in eight assaults is actually brought to their attention.

"We are a rape-prone society," says Mr. Earl-Taylor, describing a "culture of entitlement" to the sexuality of women and children, who are regarded as possessions. In the apartheid years, women in the black townships were terrorized by a phenomenon called "jackrolling," the abduction and gang rape of women, usually by groups of armed youths, who assaulted their victims in public places and made no attempt to hide their identities. While township crimes were rarely policed or reported in the apartheid years, the police have in recent years made a specific effort to encourage reporting of child and family violence.

At the same time, traditional ideas about women's place in society have changed dramatically in the past decade. A government affirmative-action program has pushed women into new educational and employment opportunities -- and there is a corresponding level of resentment from men, Mr. Lamprecht says.

Furthermore, he says, the first democratic election brought "a promise of sudden equality," but many men haven't seen it come true, especially the overwhelmingly black ranks of the 50 per cent of the population who are unemployed.

"There is a felt experience among many men of insecurity and vulnerability," Prof Sideris says. "And it may be one of the factors that plays into violence in an intimate sphere. Unemployment, no hope for future, no place in society -- intimate relationships are where one might be able to assert some kind of authority."

In almost 90 per cent of rapes reported in the past year, the victims knew their attackers. Prof. Sideris hastens to add, though, that plenty of men in difficult situations do not rape women or children, and so this is only a limited explanation.

Mr. Earl-Taylor says his study of the crime statistics suggests that the sharpest rise in violence against women comes in areas where women were, until recently, most tightly controlled.

But why the rapes of children? "Most of us who work in criminology can understand the economic basis for some crimes, the burglary and stealing -- where people are hungry, where there is no work, no way out," he says. "But apartheid can't cause someone to rape a six-month-old baby."

Fourteen per cent of rape victims here are younger than 12, but the statistics do not separate the 10-year-olds from the 1-year-olds, even though, as Supt. Neetland points out, the pathologies of the rapist in those cases are quite different. An estimated 85 per cent of the assaults of children here occur in intimate situations -- assaults by uncles, scoutmasters or teachers -- statistics similar to Canada's.

But Mr. Earl-Taylor says the number of opportunistic attacks -- like the two rapes in Cape Town this week -- is climbing steadily.

One factor is the so-called "virgin cure," the idea that sex with a virgin will either cure HIV or prevent a man from contracting it. It is not a new idea; in Europe 400 years ago, men tried to cure syphilis by having sex with virgins, and recently it has been reported as a factor in child rape in Thailand, Cambodia and across southern Africa.

"It can't be discounted as a factor here," Mr. Earl-Taylor says. "Some of these men are motivated by the factor that there is no cure and the government here is doing nothing."

Certainly, the AIDS crisis adds to the air of desperation. South Africa has more infected people than any other nation -- about five million. Six hundred of them die here every day, and 45 per cent of those arrested for rape test positive. However, Mr. Lamprecht says that of the 250 assaulted children he dealt with last year, there was only one case where the "AIDS cure" was the cause.

But what about cases like Princess, or Baby M (who took a few cautious first steps in the Cape Town hospital on Thursday, after surgery to rebuild her anus)? In Mr. Earl-Taylor's research and Supt. Neetland's experience, the baby rapes happen in a particular environment: The offenders are ill-educated, unemployed members of the lowest economic groups. They are usually drunk when they commit the attack. The victims' caregivers come from similar backgrounds, also abuse alcohol, and leave the children poorly supervised.

Infant rape presents particular challenges for the police: The victim is too young to provide a description, and the chemicals in diapers that are designed to keep babies dry also serve to destroy possible DNA evidence.

The pathology of it is different, too. "To be blunt, if it is committed with a penis, it has to be painful for the perpetrator as well," the police officer said.

The best explanation anyone can come up with for the baby rapes is vengeance -- not on the infant, but on the whole society.

"There is this kind of hate, of wanting to punish someone by raping a baby," says Supt. Neetland, who has been investigating these crimes for 12 years.

The situation with the home-invader rapists is similar, he says. "It's not because they feel like sex at this stage. It's giving expression to their hate, saying, 'You, Mr. Rich Man, here's how much I hate you, here's how powerful I am.' I'm very sure there is some kind of motive of revenge."

Mr. Lamprecht told of groups of township teens who go after young women who are seen as "wanting to be white" by dressing better, speaking better and going to school. "They can't get them in the traditional ways and so they take them. . . . It's a way of saying, 'This is how desperate we are.' And it's not just for money. There is no fiscal gain -- it has a pure vengeance motive," he says.

David Potse, the Louisville township man who was convicted of raping a nine-month-old baby in a high-profile case last year, had dated the infant's 17-year-old mother the previous year. "He told me that something will happen to me one day to make me regret ever leaving him," she told the court. "There was anger all over his face."

In addition, men who are abused in childhood are at increased risk of becoming abusers. The national children's rights group Childline reported that in 43 per cent of the cases it saw in 2000, the assailants were under 18, nearly children themselves.

After she took Princess home, Claudia Ford helped to heal her sliced perineum with daily applications of olive oil and comfrey tea, using skills she had learned as a midwife. She rocked the baby when she woke up screaming hysterically in the night, and held the little legs down with her own when it was time for a painful change of the tiny colostomy bag.

Today, Ms. Ford tries to keep the issue of rape of children in the public domain here, wondering if anyone will have found the answers when Princess is 6 or 10 or 14, and wants to know, "Why did they do this to me?"

"I gave up trying to figure out why on some levels," Ms. Ford says. "On the other hand, I know I'm going to have to answer that question.

"The horror of it doesn't really recede."

Stephanie Nolen is The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent.

FWIW, the male victims to whom I've spoken about this were all molested or raped by other men. Except one, whose babysitter molested him.


As for child rape, there is a special place in Hell for someone who would do that. It's absolutely the only way I can even bear to read about it.

I really don't respect rape. Using culture or a religion as a pretext for that is unexesuble, no matter what culture or religion. I'm a moral relativist, but rape is wrong. No situation could ever justify it.

Just to clear things up, I am Muslim but not of Arab descent. What frustrates me about these kind of stories is that when people find out what faith I am, I get either "Isn't that what the terrorists were?" or "Don't they like not respect women or something??" It just frustrates me because we try so hard to culturally assimilate but because of a few whack jobs like these rapists, we are persecuted and ostracized.
I think in general, on the other topic, that men who were molested were molested by other men, although it is not unheard of for a woman to molest a boy. I don't have specific numbers, but again it maybe one of those things that isn't reported in vast numbers out of shame, fear, etc.
Rape is sorely underreported in this country. I can't even begin to discuss it. The law definitely is not on "our" side. And even if it were, the people enforcing it are definitely not.

It's not just the law, or the enforcers. It's the court of public opinion. Being able to state that you were raped has to be one of the hardest things to say.

And even as I type that, I realize that there are sleazes that will cry rape when it's the morning after blues. Sometimes, I think that should be a crime, too.

The raping in South Africa is at a very bad endemic. One of the problem is the myth that if one have sex with a virgin, one can be cure of hiv/aids. Thank God that this has been aggresively fought by both the government (though that worthless Minister of Health is making it worst) and NGOs. I've just read that South Africa has broken the record in rape. Another problem is that the police who worked in the rape arena are greatly underfunded and undermanned. I have a friend who works in child protection unit, and she is handling over 500 cases. Then there is the suburbs of Durbanville, which is about 15 minutes from Cape Town, which only have 3 police cars to patrol this massive area. damn, i went on a rant again.

I'm sorry rudy, but I do have to comment on a few things you said that are just absurd to me. Every country has its f****d up culture..and this culture is not any less corrupted as those "fundamentalist islamic countries" you are talking about.

I too lived in an islamic country in africa, and to be honest, people over here and over there behave the exact same way...just with different type of clothing and language.

What I am saying is..there is no denying that women are getting gang-raped..but before you decide to target one group of people...take a look at whats going on in other parts of the world.....Gang-rapes happen everywhere.....and do you know who are the cause of it all....deliquent, jevenile boys....and the Criminal Justice system that only allows them to serve a 5 year sentence for rape charge...

In the countries I have lived in, no one EVER considered rape acceptable....and if they say they are...its 99.99999% coming from a male...so they do not speak for the women in that specific culture.

I don't believe that racist bullcrap you are serving people here when you say that christians don't do the same atrocities...take a look at hitler :-) and what about all those holy priests that raped all those little boys? so please, rudyy, you do not want to make ignorant comments like that here ok...

You're retarded and I honestly don't feel like showing you why you're retarded ok Opi?

-Rudey
--Yeah Sudan also deals in the slave trade, but hey let's not generalize.

Oh I forgot to add something else:

There is a growing movement of anti-islamic and anti-immigrant feelings in Europe (non-muslims are not aware of this obviously)...So an article like this would be typical in countries like the netherlands, germany and especially france....



Ruddy, and all you can say is, I'm retarded? lol that's hilarious, dude!

This is your 'thesis'. let's see how you go about proving it for us.

YAY! anecdotal evidence . . . useless in an argument. Not to mention that it is an observation used to form an opinion which is then passed as a fact. this is the only time you address the original point, and it doesn't really do you any good.

Gang rapes do happen everywhere, but the point here was examining the sheer number of these brutal attacks in one subset of a culture, then looking at the reasons for it.

One reason that I cannot identify with: "delinquent, jevenile[sic] boys". That's probably the most shallow response I've ever heard. Are the boys born delinquent? I'd imagine not - perhaps it's some pernicious societal influence? well, there's not much more proof for that, but at least it examines the actual roots of the problem, instead of saying the equivalent of "There's bad apples in every bunch!"

unless you have some sort of accurate population survey information, this whole paragraph means nothing. Also this doesn't help your thesis in the slightest. Even if the same number of people speak out against rape, obviously it is a larger part of the culture in these environments, which seems to kick your thesis in the junk.

whoa nelly, a strawman argument! also this is a key example of the fallacy of the complex question, and if you can't see why, then we can just agree to disagree and move on.

also, one of the most interesting forensics lessons I've ever heard given stated that if you ever have to resort to extreme examples such as Hitler, you're probably not proving your point. Just saying.