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South Africa: Women and Violence
South Africa: Women and Violence
Date distributed (ymd): 970813
Document reposted by APIC
This posting contains a press release from Human Rights Watch Women's
Project and Human Rights Watch/Africa, on the South African criminal justice's
failure to provide adequate response to women victims of violence.
Of related interest, The Global Women in Politics Program (G-WIP) of
The Asia Foundation and Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF)
are pleased to announce that they are seeking applications for 15 individuals
to participate in a regional Training of Trainers (TOT) workshop on advocacy
and political organizing to be held December 5-16, 1997 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
The purpose of the TOT is to strengthen national and regional training
capacities and materials to assist African NGOs to be effective advocates
and citizen organizers.
Applications are due August 20, 1997. For more information and to obtain
application forms, please contact Heather Robinson, GWIP-TAF, 1990 M St
NW, Ste 610, Washington DC 20036; Tel:(1)202-223-5268/Fax:(1)202-785-4582;
e-mail: [email protected]; or
Joana S. Foster, WiLDAF, PO Box 4622, Harare, Zimbabwe; tel: (263-4)752105/751189;
Fax: (263-4)781186; e-mail: [email protected].
South Africa
Medico-Legal System fails women victims of violence
Human Rights Watch
485 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017-6104
TEL: 212/972-8400 FAX: 212/972-0905
E-mail: [email protected]
1522 K Street, N.W. Washington D.C. 20005
TEL: 202/371-6592 FAX: 202/371-0124
E-mail: [email protected]
Human Rights Watch is a nongovernmental organization established in
1978 to monitor and promote the observance of internationally recognized
human rights in Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and among the
signatories of the Helsinki accords. The Human Rights Watch Women's Rights
Project was established in 1990 to research and investigate state-sponsored
and state-tolerated violence and discrimination against women. Dorothy
Q. Thomas is director and Kathleen Peratis is chair of the advisory committee.
Its Africa division was established in 1988 to monitor and promote the
observance of internationally recognized human rights in sub-Saharan Africa.
Peter Takirambudde is the executive director and William Carmichael is
the chair of the advisory committee.
Website Address: http://www.hrw.org
Gopher Address:
gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000/11/int/hrw
Listserv instructions: To subscribe to the general HRW e-mail list (to
receive press releases and public letters concerning all regions of the
world), send an e-mail message to [email protected]
with "subscribe hrw-news" in the body of the message (leave the
subject line blank). To subscribe to the sub-Saharan Africa-specific list
(to receive press releases and public letters only on sub-Saharan Africa),
send a message to [email protected]
with "subscribe hrw-news-africa" in the body of the message (leave
the subject line blank).
(New York, August 8, 1997)--Women victims of rape or assault in South
Africa face a criminal justice system that is too often unable or unwilling
to assist them in their efforts to seek redress. The police are frequently
callous or disinterested in their treatment of women and the court system
is little better. Of equal concern is the fact that while medical evidence
is crucial to the investigation and prosecution of rape or sexual assault,
few medical personnel are trained properly to collect and interpret such
evidence.
In Violence against Women and the Medico-Legal System in South Africa,
released to coincide with South African women's day, Human Rights Watch
calls on the South African government to intensify its efforts to protect
women from violence and to improve the state's response to such abuses,
with particular attention to the medico-legal system. "Despite recent
efforts at reform, South Africa continues to fail its women," charges
Dorothy Q. Thomas, Director of the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project.
"Too often, the treatment they receive when they try to report rape
or other abuse simply traumatizes them further, without offering them any
hope of punishing their attackers."
Of the 27,056 rapes reported in 1993, only 8,998 were prosecuted; of
the cases brought to court, 4,753 resulted in convictions, just 17.5 percent
of the total. Since 1993, the number of rapes reported has nearly doubled,
to 50,481 in 1996; of these 21,863 were prosecuted, yet only 4,100 led
to a conviction or 8.1 percent of the cases reported. While the percentage
of cases prosecuted has increased, the rate of conviction has fallen. These
worsening figures demand urgent attention.
Women who wish to pursue a charge against their assailant are usually
examined by a doctor, in most cases a state-employed district surgeon,
and obtain a report of their injuries. Although no claim of rape is invalid
for lack of such medical evidence, it often offers the only non-testimonial
support of a woman's case and as such, can be crucial to its prosecution.
Currently, in South Africa a handful of specialized medico-legal clinics
offer a dedicated and technically excellent service. However, in most cases,
the doctors who carry out the medical examination of a woman (or child)
who has been raped have received no training in this part of their practice.
Additional problems include the following:
District surgeons often do not properly document medical evidence for
use in court, and incomplete medical records for rape cases are commonplace.
- Medical legal services are often inaccessible, particularly to the
black townships and in the rural areas. Given the time-sensitive nature
of much medical evidence of sexual assault, and the trauma that accompanies
such abuse, such delays can be devastating.
- District surgeons are frequently unsympathetic or even biased in their
treatment of women who report abuse.
- District surgeons are poorly remunerated compared to doctors in private
practice and working conditions are likely to be poor.
Compounding these problems, police who are charged with referring and
transporting women to district surgeons often fail to do so. This not only
adds to already crippling potential delays, but given the inaccessibility
of many medico-legal clinics and the costs of transportation to them, may
effectively deny poor women in particular access to such services. Moreover,
if a rape case actually reaches court, police and prosecutors are usually
unable to evaluate or present medical evidence effectively to a court,
and neither magistrates nor judges are likely to be able to make up for
these deficiencies with their own training.
For the women involved, therefore, the price of reporting a sexual assault
may be hours of travel and waiting for attention, unsympathetic treatment
from police and medical personnel, and a negligible chance of seeing a
known perpetrator convicted. Moreover, having finally been examined for
such abuse, women must still go elsewhere for its treatment, as medical
legal work usually does not include any treatment for the physical or psychological
consequences of sexual assault.
The South African government has taken a number of steps to improve
the response of the criminal justice system to violence against women.
On August 9, the Department of Justice, which ran a campaign on violence
against women between November 1996 and March 21, 1997, is scheduled to
publish a major new set of guidelines for handling sexual assault cases,
addressed to all professionals in the criminal justice system, including
district surgeons. Health care is also undergoing radical reform, while
the role of the health professionals, district surgeons in particular,
in the human rights violations of the past has come under scrutiny from
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Human Rights Watch welcomes these developments and commends the government
of South Africa for these and other key steps it is taking to improve the
state response to violence against women. However, if the history of impunity
for such abuse is to be more effectively curtailed, greater attention must
be given to current flaws in the medico-legal system. We offer the following
series of detailed recommendations for further improvement of the criminal
justice system in this crucial area:
General:
- Women who have been sexually assaulted and report to a police station
should be taken by the police to be examined by a specialist medico-legal
practitioner as soon as possible to ensure that forensic evidence is not
lost.
- Following medico-legal examination, government policy should pay greater
attention to the need for women to receive appropriate treatment for injuries,
infections, or other related trauma.
District surgeons/medico-legal practitioners:
- In reforming district surgeon services, attention should be paid to
the urgent need to ensure adequate expertise in medico-legal matters among
those doctors providing medico-legal services. Training programs should
be developed for those appointed to carry out medico-legal work, both as
a requirement before appointment and as annual in-service training.
- Manuals should be developed for newly appointed district surgeons (or
district medical officers, as they are now to be known) which outline the
relevant laws for their work, review the necessary specialized medical
information (for example, ways of determining the time of injury), and
provide detailed descriptions of injuries specific to sexual assault in
both adult and child victims.
Specialized curricula in clinical forensic medicine for medical students
should be developed by the universities offering medical training and made
compulsory for all medical students, with practical expertise in a medico-legal
clinic a requirement of such courses; a qualification in clinical forensic
medicine, similar to that for forensic pathologists, should also be developed
and made available to those doctors who wish to specialize in this area
of work.
Police:
Police investigating officers handling sexual assault and rape cases
should specialize in such investigations and be trained in the issues surrounding
violence against women and the use of medical and other forensic evidence.
The courts:
- As is already the trend, each regional magistrates court should identify
specialized prosecutors to handle cases of sexual abuse and rape who should
receive additional training in the issues surrounding gender violence.
- Legislation should be introduced to abolish the use of the "cautionary
rule" in rape cases, which requires courts to exercise additional
care in assessing the credibility of a rape survivor. The cautionary rule
in rape cases places a particular premium on corroborative evidence if
a woman is to win her case.
The collection and analysis of medico-legal evidence:
- The form used by medico-legal doctors to document the medico-legal
examination should be redesigned along the lines set out in the body of
the report.
- The Pretoria forensic biology laboratory, and forensic services in
general, should be taken out of control of the police and placed under
the Department of Health, with an independent status, similar for example
to that of the attorneys general.
Collection and dissemination of information on violence against women:
- All health facilities should have information on display and available
to be taken away on the medico-legal and other services available to women
who have been subjected to sexual assault or domestic violence.
- A national directory of governmental and nongovernmental services available
to women should be developed, and information should be distributed to
police stations and magistrates courts, as well as to district surgeons,
hospitals and other health care facilities about locally available referral
services for women who have been assaulted.
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the Africa
Policy Information Center (APIC), the educational affiliate of the Washington
Office on Africa. APIC's primary objective is to widen the policy debate
in the United States around African issues and the U.S. role in Africa,
by concentrating on providing accessible policy-relevant information and
analysis usable by a wide range of groups and individuals.
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