United Press International - November 24, 2001
R.W. Johnson

In particular, the case has dramatized the fact that many rapes in South Africa are committed against minors, often because it is believed in this AIDS-stricken country that only sex with a virgin will free one of the HIV virus. With around 20 percent of sexually active adults now HIV positive, AIDS deaths already at 5,000 a week and set to triple within five years, the subject of HIV infection is becoming a national trauma. Everyone knows people who have died or who are dying of AIDS and in practice it seems that nothing is being done to make South African men wear condoms -- indeed President Thabo Mbeki publicly doubts whether HIV causes AIDS at all and refuses to distribute anti-retroviral drugs even to pregnant women (whose babies would thereby be saved) or to rape victims.

All the statistics show that women catch HIV far more easily than men and because men tend to be attracted to younger women, the HIV rates among teenage girls are far higher than among boys. Knowledge that this is so has seeped into townships and rural areas simply because the sight of young women in their early 20s dying of AIDS has now become quite common. This in turn has made girls of younger and younger ages vulnerable to men who believe that only sex with a virgin will cleanse them of the spell of AIDS. And it must be emphasized that AIDS is often seen as the result of black magic. At the rural clinic in Izingolweni (southern KwaZulu-Natal) which I visited last week Sister Irene Bopela told me that "Typically men come here saying their family has been bewitched. What this actually means is that the man has become HIV positive while in town and then, on returning to the rural area, has infected his wife and has, in rapid succession, had two or more children. Then they realize that the whole family is dying and they say they have been bewitched. It is far easier than facing up to the man's guilt."

According to the figures released last year by the Minister for Safety and Security, Steve Tshwete, there are detailed recorded cases of 8,683 children under 18 being raped in the first six months of 1999. Mr Tshwete has, since then, refused to release any further figures but no one doubts that far more cases went unrecorded and that numbers will have increased since then. However, even on the official police figures the number of child rape cases dealt with more than doubled between 1994 and 1998 -- as the AIDS phenomenon really took off.

Stephanie Schutte, a counsellor for Childline in the Western Cape, has no doubt that the two phenomena are related: "The belief is that the cleanliness and pureness of the child will strip the virus away. Women in the community are telling us that both boys and girls are being raped because of this belief." But according to Deborah Valeka, who works for Life Line in Khayelitsha squatter camp on the Cape flats, the idea predates AIDS. "It has often been believed that if you sleep with a virgin or someone younger than yourself this will cure sexually transmitted diseases. Now it is just being applied to AIDS too." Valeka believes that squatter camps (shanty towns) are especially dangerous places for children. "Children are alone at home while the mothers work and the men, who are often unemployed, have nothing to do", she points out.

The most compelling statement came from Joan van Niekerk, director of Childline. While admitting that the reasons why perpetrators committed the crimes they did were often uncertain and that far more go undetected and unpunished than vice versa, she suggested that "sometimes there is a complex mix of myths and motivations. For example -- "I'm HIV positive and angry -- and I want to take revenge on and infect as many people as possible." But, she pointed out, more and more of the victims she sees are children too young to arouse normal sexual lust. "Some have been as young as 2 years old. The younger the child the more likely there is to be serious physical damage and the more likely the open wound exposure to semen. We know of township youth who specifically target virgin girls and separate them physically from their peer groups -- for instance, when walking home from school -- and gang rape them. ... It is difficult to know where the myth about sex with a virgin will cure AIDS came from -- some believe that it was from traditional healers (witchdoctors)."

Van Niekerk's initial point is surely right. How can a baby of 2 -- let alone a baby of 9 months -- excite sexual lust in an adult male? And such crimes were, after all, unknown in traditional African society and were certainly far, far rarer even 10 years ago.

What one is dealing with here is the fact that South Africa has, in a very short space of time, become the most AIDS-hit country in the world -- in KwaZulu-Natal province the adult infection rate is now 32 percent and rising. According to Brian Williams, an AIDS researcher with the World Health Organisation who has made a special study of the town, in Carletonville near Johannesburg -- the world's biggest gold-mining center -- the HIV rate among women aged 30 is now 55 percent. That is to say, over half of all women there will fail to live to age 35. These are not prostitutes, among whom death rates are far higher, but simply young township women infected by men who frequent the numerous prostitutes who swarm round any mining town and then go on to sleep with their normal girl friends or wives. I have been out to Carletonwille with Williams and can attest to his figures.

These are terrifying figures and life expectancy is plunging. The result is a popular panic about AIDS -- at the same time that a president who is apparently in denial over AIDS causes the government to deliberately obfuscate what is happening. The result is widespread popular confusion in a situation where many men are in any case notoriously unwilling to wear condoms. Indeed, many African men cite President Mbeki -- "If even the president thinks HIV doesn't cause AIDS why should I wear a condom since it will make no difference to AIDS even if I am HIV positive?" However, such deliberately obscurantist attitudes merely ensure that a HIV-positive man infects his partner: they are no comfort to someone who fears they may soon die of AIDS. Increasingly, such people seek desperate and "instant" measures such as child rape. After all, what have they got to lose ? If they're right they save their lives, if they're wrong they never serve more than a fraction of their sentence if they are caught. In other words the child rape problem, horrific though it is, is simply part of a larger problem about the AIDS pandemic in South Africa. Only when the government faces up the problem properly, accepts that it faces a national emergency and avails itself of the world's help to fight it, are we likely to see a real change.
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