Child rape

'Thousands of children raped in SA every day' - IOL

I am not sure I trust IOL's stats, considering that they have elsewhere given us statistics on the religious/racial demographics of 282% of our population.  But I am sure that rape is unfortunately a big problem in South Africa.

This article quotes a psychologist as saying, "Ninety-nine point nine percent of their life is about survival."  I am sure that is another statistic that is made up, although, unlike the 282% of our population, it's unlikely that they intended it to be a real statistic.  More likely it was intended as hyperbole.

" ... the best therapy option for a child rape survivor in an impoverished community is to take them out of their environment where their basic needs of food, safety, and shelter are met."

If this had been seen by an editor, the ambiguity there would have been removed.

But the police can be as bad as IOL in the cases of rape.

When I was doing my community service year as a doctor in the Limpopo province, the police arrived with a rape victim and a rape kit for taking the relevant samples.

When I opened the rape kit to begin taking samples, there were already specimens in the box.  The tubes for blood contained blood, the gloves had clearly been used, and so forth.  I noticed that the handwriting was that of a colleague of mine, and the name on the specimens and box was that of a rape victim seen by him about 3 weeks before - I remembered the name because two of us were with him in casualty at the time.

So the police had taken the used rape kit, and put it back on the shelf for reuse later - not sending it away for the proper forensic analysis.

I am sure that happens quite often.

When I sent them back to the police station to collect an unused rape kit, they came back with a kit used to collect blood and semen from a male.  I wanted to collect blood, semen, and a variety of other specimens from a female, and so I had to improvise with the kit I had - who knows what I would have ended up with if I'd sent them back a second time.