Neither teachers nor students feel safe in school, according to a new report on school-based violence released this week by the South African Human Rights Commission. Some schoolgirls are exchanging sexual favors for good grades, or “sexually transmitted marks.” The school system is losing thousands of teachers a year due to psychological and physical abuse by students, the report says.
Children’s games have taken on a whole new dimension, with some 7-year-olds playing “hit me, hit me” and “rape me, rape me”, games in which schoolchildren chased and pretended to hit or rape one another.
“This game demonstrates the extent and level… brutalisation of the youth has reached and how endemic sexual violence has become in South Africa,” the report said…
Some of the more worrying trends found during the hearings were the degree of sexual harassment and rape of female, gay and lesbian pupils, said commission’s programme head, Judith Cohen…
“Corrective rape”, of a lesbian pupil by a male pupil to “make her heterosexual”, was [also] a growing phenomenon in schools, the report said. [IOL]
Alison Tilley, an attorney at the Open Democracy Advice Centre, wrote in the Mail and Guardian that radio personalities have suggested hitting the children to correct their poor behavior, but she writes that a more holistic approach is necessary.
You have to take women and girls seriously. You have to spend time in the classroom talking about sex, consumerism and violence, and why harassment and bullying is not OK. Bearing in mind that the teacher who leads this discussion is probably being harassed in the staff room, on the taxi on the way home and possibly even hit at home, this is a big [task]. We have to [task] it anyway. [Mail and Guardian]
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