Half Penny Post: South African Documentary on Lesbian Rape

I generally post light material but of late I've been seeing a lot of articles on rape in South Africa. There is a documentary called "Rape For Who I Am: South Africa" and I had never seen the full piece. Today someone posted a complete link to it and I thought I'd share it with you. (you'll need to click the play icon twice as the poster set it to show a pop-up with the first click)

For those who did not see the article in The Huffington Post "South Africa: 'Corrective Rape' Spreads To 'Fix' Lesbians" please take a moment to read it. It is based on the article that was published in The Guardian "Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks". You can see the video for the piece here.

South Africa was once one of the leading examples of what an African nation was capable of. They had a system in place for justice. They had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, though there is debate on how much good it did. Today it is one of the countries that has one of the highest crime rates. In the documentary they mentioned that someone is raped every 29 seconds. Noone has the right to harm another in the name of getting them back to normal. If anything the rapist is the one that has to brought back to the path of right and wrong. While I am thusly thinking of it, what is normal anyway? It can be interpreted 1001 different ways and no one definition is absolutely correct. We should aspire to treat each other with the same respect that we wish to be treated.

Sometimes I wonder if these men would feel as justified if their daughters were raped by other men. One woman's twin daughters were raped in order to teach the mother a lesson and one of the daughters eventually committed suicide. That I think was the story that hit me the hardest. What crime did the daughters commit? I know that it is said (loosely translated) the easiest way to hurt a mother is to hurt her childern, but honestly what kind of a man are you if you stoop so low as to hurt the children in order to get to the mother. Are there no role models out there to teach these young men what it means to respect one's self and the others around them?

In one of the videos, a bloke says he has no time to do it but thinks it's right to rape lesbians ... btw judging by his accent he is probably Zimbabwean. Another says that it is a Western thing or the latest thing. I hate to break it to them, but homosexuality was in Africa well before the colonialists came. It is recorded in ancient history and is part of the traditions that you follow today. Homophobia was introduced by the colonialists so get your facts straight. A good book to read on this is Hungochani: History of Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa by Marc Epprecht. Anyway I should quit ranting on this topic . BTW, a side note on South Africa: last year there was a wave of crimes that highlighted the xenophobia that has set in.

For those who have wondered why I really have no interest in going back home, stories like these are one of the reasons why.