Traumatised South African children play ‘rape me’ games

Chris McGreal in Johannesburg
The Guardian, Thursday 13 March 2008

South African schoolchildren are so affected by crime that they play games of “rape me, rape me” and mimic robberies in the playground, according to the country’s human rights commission. In a report on school violence published yesterday, the commission said schools were the “single most common” site of crimes against children, such as robbery and assault, including rampant sexual violence, some of it by teachers.

The commission said it had identified a number of games pupils played in response to the violence, including one in which they pretended to rape each other. “This game demonstrates the extent and level … brutalisation of the youth has reached, and how endemic sexual violence has become in South Africa,” it said.

The report said that a fifth of all sexual assaults on young people occurred at school. A survey of 1,227 female students who were victims of sexual assault found that nearly 9% of them had been attacked by teachers.

The commission also found that some boys committed what they called “corrective rape” on lesbians, justifying the assault by claiming that it would make the victims heterosexual. “There is a growing phenomenon of corrective rape. This refers to an instance where a male learner rapes a lesbian female learner in the belief that after such a sexual attack the learner will no longer be lesbian,” the report said.

A separate study by the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme found that a quarter of secondary school students said that forced sexual intercourse did not necessarily constitute rape.

The human rights commission report said that more than 40% of the young people it interviewed had been victims of some form of crime. It recommended that the education department consider introducing metal detectors and fences at schools, after the Red Cross children’s hospital in Cape Town said it commonly treated school pupils who had been assaulted with fists, knives, machetes or guns, or who had been raped.