Talk:Sexual violence in South Africa

Untitled
This article compiles the statistics impressively. What it doesn't do is tell us why. Why does this country have such a horrible incidence of rape? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.118.232.189 (talk) 18:41, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Read this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1909220.stm starting at "So why is it so bad?". Ignore what Zuma says, he's a rapist himself. --Kloth (talk) 18:30, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Child Rape
The article says: "South Africa has some of the highest incidences of child and baby rape amongst black communities in the world." That is, as an isolated statement, not very meaningful. So how does this compare to white, yellow or red "communities"?

--84.180.221.131 (talk) 16:30, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Statistics
This article actually does a pretty poor job of presenting the statistics, mostly referencing news articles' interpretations of purported actual published studies (which the newspapers do not reference). I have done a little bit to correct this, actually digging up the MRC policy report (which details its sample selection and interview procedure but not its questionnaire construction methodology), and citing that directly. Notably, these results were not published in any peer-reviewed journal, so they may not be all that reliable. They most certainly do not necessarily extrapolate to the rest of the country, as they were conducted in only two provinces out of the nine. The biggest question mark there is that those two are the provinces with the highest rate of HIV infection. As for the 500k/year claim, the IRIN article doesn't even try to back that up with a source. Maybe someone can find a reliable one elsewhere? -Kieran (talk) 21:35, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Statistics on this are bound to be difficult to find and present accurately. I agree that "news" articles tend to "interpret" rather than present data. For this reason, I removed the reference to the BBC article that claimed "It is a fact that a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped, than learning how to read." According to UNICEF, the literacy rate among women in SA is 95%, so unless 96% of South African women are raped, this line is simply a lie. Rugbyhelp (talk) 17:15, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm flagging this section of the article for unreliable sources and factual inaccuracy. It relies heavily on outdated studies, sources from media outlets that misinterpret studies, and statistics that are just wrong. AfricaCheck does a much better job of presenting the stats. Notsononymous (talk) 12:43, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
One or more portions of this article duplicated other source(s). The material was copied from: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213. Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Wgsimon (talk) 17:24, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Revising Page
I am planning to contribute a substantial amount of information on Sexual Violence in South Africa. Currently, this article exists with four sections and specifically focuses on child and baby rape and corrective rape. I want to expand on this article and provide more information on different forms of sexual violence in South Africa, South African law, medical/social ramifications, and portrayal in the media. I plan on expanding on a couple of the sections as well as adding text to existing sections and reorganizing the article.

I will be referencing the Republic of South Africa’s constitution, laws, and report to the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, along with other governmental reports, to discuss the measures South Africa has taken against this problem. I also want to display the reality behind the problem through more statistics and explore why experts believe there is such a low conviction rate for sexual violence in South Africa. I will also use more statistics and studies about the occurrence of different forms of sexual violence, including child and baby rape and corrective rape, but also using more information about rape and sexual assault of women and men, sexual violence against children and handicapped persons, domestic violence, etc. Furthermore, I want to delve into the connection between sexual violence in South Africa and HIV/AIDS.

I think that due to the high publicity of different cases of sexual violence in South Africa and the international community’s attention on South Africa as having one of the highest reports of sexual assault that an expansion of the Wikipedia article could be beneficial.

It would be really nice to get advice on how to best add onto this article. Should I move the sections of “Child and baby rape,” and “Corrective rape” under a new section discussing different forms of sexual violence in South Africa, or are those problems too high profile and important to turn into subsections? I would appreciate any feedback. Juliabarrow3 (talk) 19:59, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Possible Edit
Having you considered linking your article to HIV/AIDS in South African townships? This article has a section about rape in the sense that men diagnosed with HIV/AIDS will rape others in order to feel like they are not alone. This is very relevant to your article and you should consider either adding a section about this or hinting upon it here and then providing a link to the page. QuincyC (talk) 02:35, 6 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks Quincy! Great recommendation. I added it to my page when I talk about how the health effects of rape and other cases of sexual violence in South Africa are compounded by the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. I also added it to my See also section. Thanks for your contribution! (Juliabarrow3) (talk) 12:36, 8 April 2012 (UTC)


 * I found three more very minor edits you could make: what towns/areas were the 2 baby rapes in you talk about? In the Corrective Rape section, what’s CEDAW? And what were the ages children in the survey you cite in “Societal attitudes?” QuincyC (talk) 00:54, 11 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Great suggestions - I made the changes! Juliabarrow3 (talk)Juliabarrow3 —Preceding undated comment added 02:54, 16 April 2012 (UTC).

Suggested Revisions
This article looks great Julia! Some possible edits: 1. for your intro, add the source into the text for mor authority, for example "....according to the report by....". 2. In the section about the rates of reporting and conviction, add numbers or proportion convicted before describing what affects low rates. 3) Rape against women sounds a bit awkward. Maybe "Rape of women" or "sexual assault against women"? 4. If you make long lists, for example in the legislation section, I would maybe use bullet points to make it clearer. 5. In your section titled "Attitude", perhaps "Cultural attitudes" or "Societal attitudes" would be more specific. 6. In your section of Media portrayal, you could break it down by news and events, and literature and fiction.

Those are some of my suggestions, this looks great overall! Jennyxwen (talk) 00:48, 9 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks so much for your suggestions! I think the article will really benefit from all of your suggested revisions, particularly with arrangement in "Media portrayal" which I find much more organized and clear with your recommendations. Let me know if you can think of anything else - Thanks!

Juliabarrow3 (talk) 19:38, 9 April 2012 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Potential Revisions
Overall, this article is very well-written and organized. It covers the main topics surrounding this issue in a concise but thorough manner. Julia, you mentioned above some potential difficulties in organizing the article, and I think you have done a great job. Something very specific that I noticed is that the second sentence under corrective rape is a fragment. Though I do not think you wrote that section, Julia, it may not be a bad idea to just make that quick edit to give the page a more polished read. More broadly, I thought perhaps you could discuss regional variation in terms of the prevalence of sexual violence. Obviously this depends on whether or not such specific statistics exist, but if they do, I think it would be worth including. Any graphs or charts could also really add to the article. Overall, though, you have a great contribution here! Colleenfugate (talk) 01:19, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a really great idea. I have looked into it; it seems that there is not a lot of information about the differences by region, but I did find some some regional graphs about crime that involved sexual violence. Thanks so much for the recommendation! Juliabarrow3 (talk) 02:50, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Sexual violence in South Africa - and rape culture
Hi there

I have been working on additional material for the wiki rape culture page concerning South Africa.

I have been working with references from 1996 Taboho Maitse - Link One & Link Two and Three.

Maitse links the situation to Apartheid - social change - and it's even been linked to rapid adoption of ITC (Information and Communication Technologies) by Shereen Essof - and those links were made before the recent Vidoe incidents.

I don't know if the source materials I have found are of any value to you? I have them all in my sand box - and more besides.

I would appreciate some insights about what would be the best sources to use for inclusion in the rape culture page. It may be that there needs to be a separate page which addresses rape culture in South Africa. It is a massive subject and quite different to other parts of the world.

As I'm not South African and also not in the country I am wary that my sources are not balanced and may need review.

I am also working on material covering India too - that can be found here.

All the best! Media-Hound 'D 3rd P^) (talk)  16:32, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

A women in South Africa is more likely to get raped than educated, according to statistics
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, It does need citation from a suitable source.

Stats are just numbers - It's Humans who interpret them. Media-Hound 'D 3rd P^) (talk)  18:23, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Percantage of rapists in population
It would be interesting to read in the article what is the percentage of people in Souh Africa who have ever raped another person83.7.157.136 (talk) 21:36, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

ethnic/racial make-up of rape perpetrators
Is there no information available on the race/ethnic background of the rapists? I hope this isn't hushed up for PC reasons. --197.228.26.201 (talk) 18:39, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

===Of course it is...are you kidding?! Anyone who attempts to tell the truth about the overwhelming preponderance of rape committed by black men will be summarily censored by Wikipedia for "contributing to anti-black stereotypes." Forget the truth, political correctness is the only concern!!

Here, and in every other article, Wikipedia censors anything that might reflect negatively on black men on the grounds that this is "perpetuating a stereotype." Never mind that the "stereotype" might be based on fact. And it's not just in South Africa that black men seem, quite unfortunately, to rape at disproportionate levels; it's true everywhere in the world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.185.107.3 (talk) 18:26, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

South Africa is 80% black so it's obvious most of the rapists are black men and not white men. We should be able to present data as it is either we like it or not; as for your comment that it seems everywhere black men rape at disproportionate number; where is your evidence and in relation to who and what countries? That was a clearly biased and quite frankly racist assumption; and the same assumption can be claimed that disproportionate amount of pedophiles are homosexual or most pedophiles in US are white men; so we should trade careful with such overall assumption without actual data to back it up Nlivataye (talk) 18:13, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

history & society
I have found a lot of information in this article which has covered many questions. What I would like to know I guess is the historical info behind this. Has sexual violence on this level been a part of South African history always or did it start in modern times (or how long)? Was there a point in time where the crime became widespread? I saw a few sentences mentioning that attitudes could have developed from apartheid....is there anyone who knows the exact beginnings of this (maybe a historian)? It would really help for an outsider to understand history of the social climate of your country. Thank you!

Also, are there any organizations that deal with helping with the victims of these crimes today? That could be an interesting part to add to the article (support groups or organizations that deal with these crimes). --South19 (talk) 17:34, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Sexual violence in South Africa
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Sexual violence in South Africa's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "cnn": From Nigeria:  From Male rape: Sarah LeTrent. October 10, 2013. CNN, Against his will: Female-on-male rape. From Statutory rape:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 00:41, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Sexual violence in South Africa. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20131002102944/http://thenewage.co.za/blogdetail.aspx?mid=186&blog_id=%201213 to http://thenewage.co.za/blogdetail.aspx?mid=186&blog_id=%201213

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 19:48, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Sexual violence in South Africa. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20131017203743/http://webapps01.un.org/vawdatabase/uploads/South%20Africa%20-%20Criminal%20Law%20(Sexual%20Offences%20and%20Related%20Matters)%20Amendment%20Act%20(2007).pdf to http://webapps01.un.org/vawdatabase/uploads/South%20Africa%20-%20Criminal%20Law%20(Sexual%20Offences%20and%20Related%20Matters)%20Amendment%20Act%20(2007).pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 02:59, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Recommended update and overhaul of article
This article looks like it is a bit out of date and I see many of the sources are not greatest quality. It seems as though this article could use a serious overhaul that both updates its references as well as its content. In addition to some fact checking.--Discott (talk) 09:19, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Rice University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:26, 2 January 2023 (UTC)