Another cultural phenomenon: Rape
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/in...RAN.html?8hpib

This is so stupid and disgusting that it really makes you question why people say respect the culture. Yeah respect the culture to some extent and then go in and impose your damn will until they realize they're wrong.

-Rudey
--Why don't they just behead the males? It's a part of their culture.


Taken with permission from NYTimes:
A Crime of the Young Stalks France's Urban Wastelands
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: October 24, 2003


IGNEUX-SUR-SEINE, France — The boys were patient, standing in line and waiting their turn to rape.

Their two victims, girls of 13, were patient, too, never crying out, at least that is what the neighbors said, and enduring the violence and abuse repeatedly over five months.

That was three years ago. Late in September, 10 young men, now aged from 18 to 21, were convicted of rape in a closed courtroom in nearby Evry and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years. Seven others will go on trial in November.

The fact that they are being brought to justice at all is highly unusual. The phenomenon of gang rape in France is called something more banal: taking turns.

It occurs — how often is unknown — in the concrete wastelands built as cheap housing for immigrants, mostly from France's former colonies, in the 1950's and 1960's on the outskirts of big cities. Here, according to sociologists and prosecutors, teenage boys, many of them loosely organized into gangs, prey on neighborhood girls.

Many of the boys are raised in closed, traditional families and are hopelessly confused or ignorant about sex; others are simply street toughs. In this world, women enjoy little respect; often girls who appear weak, or wear tight-fitting clothing, or go out unaccompanied by their fathers or brothers, are considered fair game.

To avoid trouble, many girls have taken to wearing loose-fitting jogging clothes, and hidden themselves behind domineering fathers or brothers; others have organized themselves into their own gangs. Many of the Muslim girls have donned head scarves — more for protection than out of religious conviction.

In the basement of No. 4, place Albert Einstein, in this working-class suburb where the rapes took place, a scrawl across a white wall explains why so few cases are prosecuted. "The law of silence is our sixth sense," it reads.

"I've heard too many of these stories, and it's become unbearable," said Samira Bellil, 30, a gang-rape victim, whose book, "In Gang-Rape Hell," was a best seller in France last year. "The word of the boys is often believed. So the trauma is not just the violence but the torment that comes if a girl comes forward and breaks the silence. We have to stop taking sides with the wolves."

Ms. Bellil was gang-raped at age 14. She had fallen in love, and agreed to have sex with her boyfriend. Three of his friends were waiting outside. They kicked and beat her and gang-raped her throughout the night. She waited before reporting the rapes, and did so only after three of her friends told her that they too had been raped by one of her attackers.

The appearance of Ms. Bellil's book last year coincided with the death of a 17-year-old girl named Sohane, who was burned alive by an angry boyfriend in the Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. A book about that murder is still on the best-seller list.

In the recent court case, the assault on the two girls was either oral or anal; vaginal sex would have stolen the girls' virginity, which apparently was not the goal of the attackers.

"In many cases, the violence of a band of young men against a girl is considered a rite of sexual initiation to prove one's manhood," said Hugues Lagrange, a sociologist at the Center for Scientific Research in Paris who specializes in adolescent sexuality. "In the boys' minds, if a girl's virginity is respected, then nothing bad has happened."

The girls' story seeped out months after the events, according to Laurent Le Mehaute, the lawyer for one of the girls. After rumors circulated at their high school, the director got police involved. At first, the girls denied the story, but eventually identified 18 boys as their rapists.

None of the boys had a previous criminal record. All but one confessed to having sex with the girls, even acknowledging that it was not consensual. The one who claimed his innocence was acquitted.

At the vast housing project where the girls lived and where the rapes occurred, the grounds are clean, even landscaped. The population is multiracial and multiethnic, blending both French-born citizens and immigrants from places like North and sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and the Caribbean. Nearby are a butcher selling halal meat, an oriental pastry shop and coffeehouse, a laundromat, a health club and a supermarket — as well as drug dealers openly selling hashish.

Prejudice against the girls lingers. "What were the girls doing in the afternoons down in the basements?" asked a woman who lives on the first floor of the building. "Why did their parents let them go there? They know what happens if they follow the boys. They know what happens if they go to the basement."

The neighborhood butcher, from Algeria, talked about the suburb as a world apart. "If a girl goes out, she's going to get into trouble, especially with Arabs and blacks, because they are not used to seeing girls outside," he said. "The boys have needs. Where I come from, it's not normal that a girl goes out at night. If I tell my sister not to go out, she obeys me. This world is not like France."

Both the neighbor and the butcher spoke on condition that their names not be used.

There are no reliable statistics, but Mr. Lagrange estimates that there are more than four times as many gang rapes in France today as there were two decades ago; at least part of the increase can be attributed to more young women coming forward.

Transparency comes at an exceedingly high price. After one of the girls spoke out, said Mr. Le Mehaute, the lawyer, "she couldn't go out anymore."

"People spat on her. There was tremendous psychological damage. Both girls felt humiliated, dirty."

The girl's 39-year-old father became so depressed after the truth was disclosed that last summer he hanged himself. The girl had tried but failed to kill herself the year before by slashing her arms. Both girls were harassed so mercilessly that have since moved away from the project. One lives with relatives, the other in state-run housing.

clarify
 

I read the article (reportage on France), does the "they" in your post refer to the ethnic males there (specifically the ones who support/do not condemn the rapes)?

Yeah.. I am confused too...
 

Are you referring to the French Culture? I don't think this is French Culture, you see an article like this everyday in the LA Times, and I wouldn't consider it a US culture.

holy geez,
ok guys i'm referring to the immigrants (99% of which coming from Arab and African countries) that have come into Western (in this case French) society.

-Rudey
--This isn't too hard to figure out so I don't know why i'm explaining it.

Sick, absolutely sick. Too bad those poor girls aren't like me--I'd beat the boys up. When you're almost 6' tall, guys don't seem to mess with you quite so much! :D

This is f*cking sick...as much as I hate to admit it, I honestly understand why non-Muslims have such unfavorable views of Muslims. Western society hears far too many stories like this, and can't help but make assumptions. Too often culture takes precedent over religious beliefs, which sets a terrible example. Yet these types of people are the first to b*tch about anti-Muslim sentiment in the West.
What I don't understand is 1) why the French government doesn't do more to prevent this kind of crap and 2) Why these sick bastards only got a few years in jail. Maybe the American justice system isn't the only one a bit too lenient towards criminals.

Reading this article just angered me. I think that is very sick indeed.

However, I admire Ms. Bellil for telling her story of what happened to her as well as the other girls who had been through the same thing as she had.


http://burns.thefinaldimension.org/u...d/mumumani.gif

Oh, come on. There is plenty of f*cked up stuff that Christian extremists do, and if you were to just Christians only by the worst things that they do -- bombing abortion clinics and killing gays -- you would have a pretty skewed version of what Christianity is like. Anybody who judges any entire religion based on the bad things they read about it is pretty dumb, IMO.

The thing is that stuff like this happens in America, too. All over America? Of course not. But in certain places? Definitely. And obviously this sort of thing doesn't happen ALL over France, as the article made clear. Attitudes towards rape are sometimes not much different here than the people quoted in this article. I was eating dinner with my family last weekend while the people in the booth next to us were discussing the Kobe case. They distinctly used the phrase "Boys will be boys" and said that if girls wear "scandalous clothing" they're asking for it. That's not all that far from "If they go in that basement, they know what will happen," which is in itself not far from the Italian argument that if a girl was wearing pants, she couldn't have been raped, it had to have been consensual. After all, it's not like someone could have forced her to take her pants off . . .

I agree with Rudey though. "Respect the culture" is bullsh*t in cases like this.

I'm not a violent person at all, but I would like to get on a plane and go to France and kick these people's asses -- the guys and the people who claim it's the girls' fault. Attitudes like that piss me off as much as the violence does.

*hijack*

So, i'm guessing you are in favor of the Death Penalty then?

Kitso
KS 361 convicts sent to Ol' Sparky(figuratively) in Texas last year

Sorry but you're wrong. We do not have stoning in our culture. We don't rape women and consider it acceptable; it's large believed to be a horrible crime.

I've lived for 6 years in one of the most fundamentalist islamic countries in the world. Trust me when I say there is absolutely no comparison you can make that Christians in America do the same things.

-Rudey

This article is so sad. At least it seems like they're moving forward a little bit, seeing as how usually the rapists aren't even punished....

valkyrie, I completely agree with you about how the old "they did it to themselves" attitude is more upsetting then the violence. people are sick... and wrong

Nowhere did I compare what Christians do to what Muslims do. Just saying that if you take the worst of each culture you get a pretty skewed version of what that religion is like. Do I think there are aspects of Christianity that are screwed up? Sure. Do I think that the same is true of Islam? Of course.

Until you have lived as a female in America, I don't think you can understand the rape culture here. Yeah, rape is considered a crime, but to what extent? I have four friends that were raped, and multiple other friends who had near misses. Not a single one reported it, not even to go to the hospital and get checked out. Not one tried to go after their rapists because they knew that they would have to deal with the backlash. And that's out here in hippie suburbia. Using the Kobe case as an example (although I haven't decided whether or not she's innocent, for the sake of the example it doesn't really matter), your sexual history and emotional problems are dragged through the mud, and you are painted as a slut and/or a psycho. If you are a woman with a history of taking antidepressants, attempting suicide, or being in therapy, you might as well throw away the case right now. Ditto for if you were drinking, ever had a reputation for being "promiscuous" or had flirted with your rapist at some point during the night. Nobody I know would be able to deal with that after getting raped. Yes, we do treat rape as a crime -- generally -- in cases where it springs up. But way too often, people try to pretend it didn't happen because they can't deal with the fallout. There are far, far many more rapists in this country that are allowed to walk free than there are ones that are convicted. And sh*t like that described in this article happens in America far more often than most people would like to admit. Like krazy said, you could probably find a similar article in the LA Times pretty easily.

I think a lot of guys don't understand rape culture because they're ignorant of it. Almost none of my guy friends know about their female friends being raped or assaulted. As it is, well over 75 percent of my female friends -- that I know of -- have been a victim of some kind of sexual assault (I'm talking about serious assault, not "some guy grabbed my boobs in a bar) in their life, and not a single one has attempted to press charges. Those stats about 1 in 3 women being sexually assaulted in her lifetime are not made up, and in reality that is only the reported number -- from what I can tell, the actually statistics are much, much higher. I wouldn't say that that means we're doing a great job with rape over here either.


Dude, the way my posts have been today I'll soon be competing with decadence.

I actually went with a friend to a group session on rape and even listened to a guy talk about how he was raped and kept drugged for an entire day in some apartment with these other dudes who gave it to him pretty hard. I almost cried.

Either way this is more about how some people try to use their culture to excuse certain vile acts. If you behead them like in Mecca, I think they might not like their culture.

-Rudey
--That was even sadder than the movie Wall Street.

Saying that the cited article disgusts and appalls me doesn't even begin to speak of how I feel about this.

But let's talk about the US. I volunteer at a divorce recovery seminar, and I am always surprised when the statistic of 1 out of every 4 females has been sexually molested or raped by the age of 18, while 1 out of every 12 males has been sexually molested or raped by the age of 18. When I question it, there are always those who will make me understand that the statistic works.

Discussion?

This is really sad....people need to be educated about these things. Horrible things like this go on in very place including America. :(

That statistic is really skewed. I'm taking a class that does a lot of work with public opinion right now, and some of the things that were included in that study were really bogus. For example, say I went to a movie with a boy, kissed him, and regretted it later. He "molested" me according to some of the questions that were used. I'll ask my professor next week to get me some more of the stats on that.

I read somewhere that the majority of guys that were raped were not raped by women, but by men. Anybody got statistics to back that one up?

Your point?
(i.e would that mitigate it??)

Basically we think you're a rapist Richard.

-Rudey
--It's scary.

*slight hijack*

Rudey you said rape is not acceptable in the United States?

Why then does a woman's sexual history come into play in a rape case in court? why is that relevant (IE: Kobe Bryant's accusar who they tried to discredit by saying she had sex 3 days before the attack :rolleyes: )

Half the rapes in this country go unreported

x2

'Ha-ha'. That wasn't what I thought or implied.
I just wondered if she was wondering about the ratio of female to male (victim) versus male to male rapes, period; or pseudo-commenting that the figures didn't place as much blame on males as perhaps they should (or could)/suggesting one type of rape was 'less serious' than the next.

Nope, just curious. A lot of people think that rape automatically means male vs female.

Also - it would be much more difficult for a woman to rape a man than for a man to rape a man.

GP - obviously. I was simply querying what she meant by her original post which she kindly clarified.

Because Kobe Bryant is already on trial for rape signifying it's not acceptable. The fact is you don't throw everyone and their mom in jail because some woman decides to cry rape. This lady not only has a history that can be used to establish the fact that she's unstable and lying, was seen afterwards acting as if nothign had happened by her coworker although claiming she was distraught, and also the latest evidence of another man's sperm. All that combined are good in helping paint a picture of this woman that could show that she is lying by the defense.

-Rudey
--Innocent until proven guilty by the way since you keep bringing up Kobe.

I have read this article before and I think it made me as mad the first time as it did the second.
Culture or no culture it is still wrong

OK Kobe was the only known case I could come up with at the last minute. It is a common practice though to bring a woman's sexual history into court for a rape case for the reasons you mentioned. All I was saying was that most rapes go unreported because women don't want to go through that embarressment. Just playing Devil's Advocate with the 'rapes not being accepted in the U.S."

:p

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.