South Africa Letter:A five-year-old girl drowns while attempting to flee a rapist. A man is charged with sodomising his 16-day-old son - and is then released on 3,000 rand (€330) bail when he claims a heart condition. A woman is gang- raped by a group of teenagers and young men on a tourist beach.
Tales of brutality against women and children are all too familiar in South Africa. What makes the above particularly depressing, however, is that they all occurred during a recent 16-day campaign of activism against sexual and physical abuse.
The state-sponsored campaign, which ended last month, was hailed as a success by the government. Promising more awareness-raising activities and a "detailed all-year action plan" in 2007, the junior minister with responsibility for the 16-day campaign, Nomatyala Hangana, said it had helped more victims to speak out against abuse. But activists - who estimate that a rape occurs every 26 seconds in South Africa - believe much more needs to be done to protect society's most vulnerable members.
"The abuse of women is absolutely scandalous, as is the abuse of children," says Sr Áine Hughes, a Franciscan nun who has been working in South Africa for the past 25 years. "The government wastes money on glossy posters and big get-togethers to discuss the problem but there are no concrete plans." A native of Co Galway, who works with vulnerable women and children through the Catholic Church's regional development agency, the Siyabhabha Trust, Sr Hughes believes domestic abuse is linked, not only to poverty, but to the legacy of apartheid.
"The pattern is the same everywhere in the world - of the oppressed becoming oppressors," she says.
She herself experienced the brutality of the apartheid regime, dodging threats from the security forces as she smuggled information out of South Africa to the likes of Amnesty International. Since 1994, she has been carjacked twice at gunpoint, and has witnessed much more besides - having been posted to the notoriously crime-ridden Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow.
"It's easier to work now than before," she says. "In the apartheid era, it was just hell." On the other hand, "the poor are definitely increasing [ in number]."
Just how difficult it will be to root out domestic violence is illustrated by the deprivation one encounters at townships like "France" in Free State Province. The township is so called as it was founded in 1998, the year in which the European country last hosted the soccer world cup.
Today, the streets of France are lined with iron shacks and a cluster of state-funded houses, the biggest of which - residents point out - belongs to a local government councillor. Thousands of people have made the shantytown their permanent home, including countless foreign nationals who had hoped - mostly in vain - to find work in the nearby Sasolburg oil refinery.
Rebecca Malebese, chairwoman of Justice For Children (JFC), a local campaign group, says these immigrants are particularly vulnerable to poverty as they don't qualify for government grants. "They make a living selling vegetables or peanuts," she says. "And if they die the children are left alone, and no one knows where to find their relatives. Abuse starts from there."
As well as trying to provide for the basic needs of vulnerable children, the group runs advice workshops and discussion groups for people who have suffered sexual or physical abuse. Malebese believes the government's 16-day campaign has helped "because people are now coming together and talking about these things". Women's rights groups have also welcomed a recent decision by the ruling African National Congress to expel its chief whip for lecherous behaviour.
Determined to the point of defiance, Malebese - a single parent who also cares for her 78-year-old invalid mother - is part of a new breed of South African activist women. Refusing the mantle of passive victimhood, such women comprise "99 per cent" of volunteers fighting domestic and gender-based violence, and allied problems such as HIV/Aids, according to Sr Hughes.
Proclaiming herself to be "realistic rather than pessimistic" about South Africa's future, the Irish nun believes these volunteers - who battle against sometimes unimaginable odds - are the country's greatest asset.
"They are incredibly big-hearted and generous and compassionate," she says, adding perhaps a little modestly: "The spirit of the African woman . . . I just don't have it."
