Woman torched for missing cellphone

From news reports, we don’t know a whole lot about Monique Martin, a 19-year-old woman who was set alight by four men nearly two years ago all for a missing cell phone.

The suspects, Ashwin Hammers, 20, Myron Daniels, 28, Ashley Lategan, 24, and a youth who may not be named, are pleading not guilty in the case, which the Cape High Court is hearing this week. The killing happened in a Strand home near Cape Town.

A witness told the court yesterday that Martin would not have been attacked if she had spoken up and said the missing cell phone was with her boyfriend, Myron Daniels.

The witness also said Martin begged for her life.

Mother raped in front of 6-year-old son

Margot Ludik and her husband Andries.

It was the wee hours of the morning, and Margot Ludik and her husband Andries were lying next to one another asleep in their Leeufontein home when suddenly their bedroom lights were switched on and they saw several armed strangers hovering over them.

“The robbers were shouting ‘we are going to kill you, you are going to die,’” Andries Ludik told a reporter.

The robbers woke the couple’s two young children, and tied their 5-year-old daughter face down next to her father in the bathroom, and their 6-year-old son next to his mother in the master bedroom. They retrieved 5,000 rand cash, and the Ludik’s thought the ordeal was over.

Margot said she believed everything was going to be fine when the robber untied her hands, massaged them and then retied them. “I really think it was a parting thought, but he climbed onto me while I was lying tied up. [IOL]

The couple have since underwent counseling and left for Austrailia.

“It is just crime and violence, and nothing is going to change” in South Africa, said Andries, a well-known lawyer in Pretoria who represents celebrities like Leon Schuster, Sonette Bridges and Louis van Wyk.

19-year-old Sentenced to Life in Prison for Raping Neighbor

A judge sentenced a 19-year-old man to life in prison for gang raping his 13-year-old neighbor who was walking home from school.

Magistrate Kgame Shai said the sentence would act as a deterrent to young people who thought their age would let them off the hook for serious crimes. [IOL]

The 19-year-old, an eighth grader at ZB Kunene Secondary School in KaNyamazane, threatened to assault the girl if she had told anyone, and “the court noted” he showed no remorse. Two male suspects were acquitted because the girl could not positively identify them. A fourth suspect remains at large.

Rural women are the biggest losers in HIV response

From Amnesty International:

Despite gradual improvements in the government’s response to the HIV epidemic and the adoption of a widely-welcomed five-year plan, five and a half million South Africans are HIV-infected – one of the highest numbers in any country in the world. Fifty-five percent of them are women. South African women under 25 are between three and four times more likely to be HIV-infected than men in the same age group.

Many women interviewed by Amnesty International said that they were often unable to protect themselves against HIV infection because they felt at risk of violence when they suggested condom use.

Man accused of raping mentally disabled girl is acquitted

It was the Christmas holiday, and a 13-year-old girl was visiting relatives in the Free State. But when her relatives left the home to buy alcohol, they later found her undressed, and with a man wearing just his trousers.

That man, Mtutuzeli Mvandaba, of Lingelhle, Cradock, was charged with rape. However, on Friday, he was acquitted in the Grahamstown High Court because the girl, who is mentally disabled, is unable to testify.

“Her mood and affect (emotions) are restricted in that there is a restriction in her feeling and tone[, said clinical psychologist Karen Andrews. "]In addition to the appearance of subnormal intelligence, her mental state is characterised by anhedonia – this means she is emotionally withdrawn and indifferent. She has very little interest in her surroundings, or life in general.” [News24]

Senior State advocate Nickie Turner told the judge that under the circumstances she regrettably had no option but to withdraw the charge.

Justices fire back

The hard hitting report released by the Gender Health and Justice Research Unit at the University of Cape Town and the Women’s Legal Centre last week was based on inaccurate information and quotes taken out of context, Justice CM Somyalo of the Eastern Cape High Court Division wrote in the Sunday Times yesterday.

The report offers examples of judges failing to hand down the minimum sentence for those convicted of rape, and showing a lack of sensitivity for rape victims.

Somyalo writes that details on Judge Jeremy Pickering, who according to the report, sentenced a man to 15 years for raping his six-year-old daughter, and then saying the man acted “on the spur of the moment,” was taken out of context.

Unsafe Schools — New report details school-based violence

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.

Rape Victims Face Further Injustice in the Courts

A new report by the Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit at the University of Cape Town says that many judges fail to impose minimum mandatory sentences against rapists and use “flimsy excuses” to avoid handing down harsher sentences.

Legally, rapists should be sentenced to at least 25 years in prison when the victim is raped more than once or is younger than 16.

- Judge Jeremy Pickering sentenced a man to 15 years last year for raping his six-year-old daughter. The judge said the man acted “on the spur of the moment”.

-Judge AJ Visser sentenced Joseph Ntuli to eight years, with four years suspended, for raping a 14-year-old girl twice. In the 2003 sentencing, Judge Visser said the victim, “being the pretty girl she is, might have brought out the animal in the accused”.

-Judge Hendrick Musi sentenced a man to an effective 13 years for raping five girls under the age of 16. He said the rapist “intended no harm other than to satisfy his sexual lust”. [Sunday Times]