The next morning, Mvuleni came round, bleeding, battered, in shock,
and taunted by one overriding memory – the last thing they said to her
before she passed out: "After everything we're going to do to you,
you're going to be a real woman, and you're never going to act like this
again".
Corrective rape is a hate crime wielded to convert
lesbians to heterosexuality – an attempt to 'cure' them of being gay.
The term was coined in South Africa in the early 2000s when charity
workers first noticed an influx of such attacks. But despite recognition
and international coverage, corrective rape in the region is escalating
in severity, according to Clare Carter, the photographer behind these
images. This is amid a backdrop of parts of the country "becoming more
homophobic", as one recent victim asserts.
Compared to many of
South Africa's victims, Mvuleni was lucky: she survived. At least 31
women in the past 15 years did not. In 2007, to cite one incident,
Sizakele Sigasa, a women's and gay rights activist, and her friend
Salone Massooa, were outside a bar when a group of men started heckling
and calling them tomboys. The women were gang raped, tortured, tied up
with their underwear and shot in the head. Executed. No one was ever
convicted.
Mvuleni's case was also unusual as, unlike 24 out of 25
rapes that even reach trial in South Africa, two of her attackers were
convicted and imprisoned for 25 years. The others remain at large.
Ever
since a 1998-2000 report by the United Nations Office on Crime and
Drugs ranked South Africa as highest for rapes per capita, it has
repeatedly been described as the rape capital of the world: 500,000
rapes a year; one every 17 seconds; one in every two women will be raped
in her lifetime. Twenty per cent of men say the victim "asked for it",
according to a survey by the anti-violence NGO, CIET. A quarter of men
in the Eastern Cape Provinces, when asked anonymously by the Medical
Research Council, admitted to raping at least once – three quarters of
whom said their victim was under 20, a tenth said under 10. A quarter of
schoolboys in Soweto described "jackrolling" – the local term for gang
rape – as "fun".
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