Michael Bleby
17 March 2008
Johannesburg — SCHOOL children playing a "catch" game in which they mimic rape. A seven-year-old raped and murdered by a family member. An actor killed by would-be hijackers trying to steal his neighbour's bakkie. A man, his wife and their teenage son shot at home by armed robbers. A single woman stripped naked and assaulted by drivers at a taxi rank.
While overall crime is falling in SA, the rising incidence of violent crimes people report anecdotally is backed up by figures.
National figures supplied by the South African Institute of Race Relations, based on police statistics, show that in the 12 years between 1994-95 and 2006-07, rape, indecent assault and robbery with aggravating circumstances increased. In that period murder and attempted murder declined.
"The overall crime rate has come down significantly, 14%, but it is the violence of the crimes committed that makes the public very uncomfortable," says Kerwin Lebone, a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
The increase in violence that did not exist 15 years ago has many people wondering why SA is so violent. The cabinet has commissioned the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), a research body, to write a report on the very topic. The final report is due in November.
Those who deal with violent crime regularly say it is on the rise. Irma Labuschagne is a Pretoria-based forensic criminologist. She prepares pre- sentencing reports for defence or prosecution legal teams, profiling offenders, explaining why they committed their crime and recommending the most constructive sentence.
A former head of the support group Rape Crisis in Pretoria, she says violence is no longer a subculture of crime in SA, but increasingly becoming a major part of it.
"The violence is reaching the forefront ... I'm now feeling it's becoming a culture of violence. It's so widespread," she says. She cites rape as an example. While always a violent act, it has become more so.
"I have now begun to see for the past two to four years that the nature of that crime has changed to such absolute violence. It was never like that. In general, let's say she is left with critical injuries. There are unspeakable horrors which were the exception way back but are not any more."
David Bruce, a researcher at the Braamfontein-based CSVR, says aggravated robbery is concentrated in Gauteng, the region that produces 40% of the country's gross domestic product. He says the increasing inequality in SA is one reason for the violence.
"It's not a coincidence that SA has high levels of inequality and it is also very violent," he says.
The Gini co-efficient, a figure between 0 and 1, where the closer the number to 1, the more unequal the society, rose in SA from 0,68 in 1991 to 0,77 in 2001, according to the Human Sciences Research Council. Statistics SA this month put the figure at 0,72.
Bruce says this is a key to the violence suffered in SA -- especially given a South African tendency to show off one's wealth.
"Inequality means relative deprivation. People feel deprived. It's not just the feelings of deprivation, it's the feelings of inadequacy that are evoked. South African society is still structured in a way that gives recognition to the wealthy and affluent and dismisses poor people. People are brought in quite a direct way face to face with their own kind of meaninglessness."
Labuschagne says South Africans are angrier than they have ever been with each other.
The often unrealistic hopes that were created in many black South Africans with the advent of democracy in 1994 have not been fulfilled.
"They were promised, or perhaps perceived that they were promised, so, so much," she says. "They understood it as very, very quickly there would be proper houses for everybody, there would be wonderful free medical services, free good education, there would be jobs. It doesn't just happen overnight and it didn't. For many millions it went worse. That is how many feel. When you lose hope, you are going to be very angry. "
On the other side, many whites have grown angry with the impression that everything is being taken away from them, she says.
"The group who had feel that whatever they had is gradually being taken away. There's an anger on the other side that they are now losing out and they don't count as human beings. We are so mad at each other."
Both SA and India have great poverty, but India does not suffer the same violence.
Labuschagne says this is because family structures are far more intact in the subcontinent than in SA. And the breakdown in families in this country was a direct result of apartheid, she says.
" We all have this image of a benign granny sitting somewhere with kids who were taught right from wrong. Millions of children grew up with nothing. They have no idea what a family means, no idea what's right and wrong.
"How on earth would they have picked it up? It is not their fault, but it did happen and those children are now fast becoming parents themselves. What on earth do they have to carry on to their children but the same horror again and again?"
Crime is indeed happening among the young more than among adults.
A report released last week by the South African Human Rights Commission said that schools were the "single most common" site of crimes such as assault and robbery against pupils. A separate study by the Cape Town-based Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention showed that young people were twice as likely to become victims of crime as adults.
Labuschagne says the key is to try to rebuild family structures from the ground up. Crèches need to be made available for working township mothers to help bring up their families. Rebuilding family structures can only happen from the ground up.
"If we can't even take care of those babies, we've got to start there. Then proper nursery schools, then after-school centres for adolescents."
Bruce points to the economy. If the main cause, inequality, is reversed, then there is hope.
"It seems that inequality reinforces dynamics in South African society which feed into feelings of inadequacy and feed into greed and all things like that.
"So one can make the simple statement that attacking inequality is part of what needs to be done if the country is going to tackle the endemic violence."
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