Rape Crisis Helderberg is a non-profit organisation committed to helping survivors of rape and abuse overcome their trauma through caring counselling in the Helderberg Basin and surroundings. The Crisis Centre offers these services free of charge and for individuals 18 years and above.
We offer free Counselling to past and present survivors of Sexual Assault, Child Abuse, Rape, Incest and GBV ER Number: 083 484 9409
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If you look carefully at the SA Police Service’s list of 30 gender-based violence hot spots, released last September, you’ll see that violence has a geography: places where it concentrates and intensifies over time; places where it breaks apart and subsides.
Why is this so? The list cannot say because it offers information rather than understanding, so it limits the ability to do much about reshaping this violent landscape. To understand why the geography looks the way it does, and what to do about it, we need to go beyond simply naming a particular place a hotspot.
First, it’s important to be clear about why a particular locale is designated a hot spot. One reason is that it is recording very high levels of violence. Another is that it demonstrates a consistent increase in violence recorded over time.
While the police rape statistics illustrate both trends, the service ranks its hot-spot stations in order of magnitude only. But both kinds of analyses are needed, as they produce different, but equally important results.
Police data shows just a partial picture of violence – but we can still learn from it
The police statistics for rape, set out in annual crime reports, list the 30 stations around SA recording the highest number of rapes. While these numbers are imperfect — they don’t capture the extent of underreporting or control for population size — they do allow for some rough and ready, back-of-the-envelope calculations.
The five police stations in South Africa reporting the highest number of rapes in 2019/2020.
The table above highlights the five SA police stations where the most rapes were recorded in 2019/2020, and compares this with their reported figures from 2010/2011. While the trend is generally down, stations in the KwaZulu-Natal towns of Inanda and Umlazi have consistently topped the list for nine years. Mthatha, in the Eastern Cape, however, is showing an upward trend.
Mthatha is not the only station recording a steady increase: the table below lists nine of the 30 stations where reports of rape have increased by more than 10% over the same nine-year period.
Police stations in South Africa recording increases in rape in excess of 10% between 2010/11 and 2019/20.
Even accounting for a possible recording error, Diepsloot, in Gauteng, has witnessed a significant increase in rapes over the years. (The 37 rapes in 2010/2011 recorded seem surprisingly low in comparison to subsequent years). Given the percentage increase, it should, along with Lusikisiki (Eastern Cape) and Delft (Western Cape), be a top priority for intervention.
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Taken together, the tables make it clear that rape is not a static phenomenon. The extent of its perpetration changes over time and in both directions (increasing and decreasing). Comparing the two could help broaden our understanding of what makes rape more or less possible, and thus what could be done to limit the conditions for violence.
This is key to deepening and enriching interventions to prevent rape that, for the most part, focus on behavioural change to undo destructive gendered norms. But because they are applied generally, rather than in ways that respond to the particular conditions of specific places, they, too, may be missing the mark.
Lisa Vetten
Lisa Vetten is a research and project consultant in the faculty of humanities at the University of Johannesburg where she works on the ‘Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa’ study.