Shocking truth about how more boys being raped vs to girls

Posted by Ramon Thomas on November 18, 2007

Our children are raping each other

by NASHIRA DAVIDS and BUYEKEZWA MAKWABE

• Boys as young as seven in sex attacks
• 43% of assaults committed by kids

Twelve-year-old Thomas Green* was sodomised over and over and over in a series of brutal sex attacks.

The sadistic assaults he was forced to endure were perpetrated by pupils — at his very own primary school.

His mother, Veronica, said it was only after her 12-year-old son came home covered in blood and his grandmother noticed he had trouble walking that they discovered that he was suffering at the hands of about seven Grade 5 pupils who used him as their sex slave.

Alarmingly, Thomas is not the only child being humiliated in this sick way. Boys as young as seven have sexually attacked other children.

Experts and child abuse activists have warned that sexual abuse at schools is on the increase and this extreme form of bullying in South Africa is “out of control”.

Shocking trends are emerging. Joan van Niekerk of Childline said a disturbing 43% of sexual crimes reported to the organisation’s hotline this year were committed by children.

Shaheda Omar, one of the managers at the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, said inappropriate sexual behaviour could start as early as pre- school.

“I am thinking of a case that we had where a five-year-old girl inserted a foreign object into the vagina of another girl. It was aggressive behaviour, not for sexual gratification,” she said.

“For children, sex is confused with power. In a situation where there is bullying, where there is power negotiation, you find that it becomes the currency of power . .. We are very much aware of how much abuse there is between children themselves and sexual abuse in particular,” said Van Niekerk. Rapcan, an organisation fighting child abuse and neglect, said 40% of reported rape cases in South Africa were perpetrated by people under 18.

“It is thus reasonable to draw the conclusion that a significant number of children rape and sexually abuse other children. At Rapcan, we have direct information about boys as young as seven sexually abusing other children.”

Professor Corene de Wet, a researcher at Free State University, said that during her research at schools in the Free State, she had found that boys were being sexually harassed more than girls.

De Wet pointed out that sexual harassment was a form of extreme bullying — common nationwide in all race groups.

“But people don’t speak about this problem at our schools. Boys being sodomised — this happens … often during initiation and at hostels, but it happens everywhere,” she said.

De Wet’s latest research on sexual harassment at schools, which involved more than 470 children, concluded:

• 53.89% of children said they had been victimised by girls through unwanted kissing;
• 43.44% said girls grabbed them, touched them and pinched them in a sexual way while only 7.78% said boys did the same;
• 12.22% said girls and 6.67% said boys wanted to have unwanted sex with them; and
• 3.33% of respondents said they had been raped by peers in the past 12 months — and 66.67% of these rapes were committed by girls.

One boy who took part in the research wrote: “I felt hate and was annoyed . . . She pushed me down on the floor and took off her dress then she started having sex with me.”

And a girl wrote: “It happened last year towards midnight when I came back from study. One boy forced to kiss me and was successful only because he was powerful and strong. He forced himself on me.”

Carol Bower, the former head of Rapcan who now works as an independent consultant, said the root of the problem was that children were exposed to high levels of sexual abuse.

“ In Southern Africa, where there is a high level of coercive sexuality, children see their fathers beating up their mothers or their partners beating them up. We also have extremely high levels of sexual abuse of children in this country,” she said.

“It all gets cooked up in a whole big pot of trying to be powerful and in control, and what you see around you is that younger and younger children are perpetrating sexual offences.”

Margaret Arnold, an anti- abuse campaigner, said she was aware of several cases of rapes perpetrated by children around the country. “Sex has become something nasty and horrible — a filthy thing you find kids are using to hurt someone. They know raping will hurt you,” she said.

Another Cape Town primary school child was sodomised by schoolmates between the ages of nine and 10 and in KwaZulu- Natal a girl was penetrated by 10-year-old female bullies at her school.

“Unfortunately some of these young victims want to take revenge. And often they become perpetrators in adulthood. Schools are supposed to be a place of safety. But sexual violence is happening and often teachers are pushing it under the rug,” said Arnold.

Veronica Green said she did not know whether her son would ever recover.

“He lost so much weight. He doesn’t want to speak about what happened at all. He says they are going to kill him and he is afraid. He has become violent already — punching his younger brother on his backside aggressively. I don’t know what I am going to do — the doctors said he was penetrated at least five times. The school denied this all when I confronted them. They said it was Thomas who was playing with his penis in class,” said Veronica.

Uitsig Primary School on the Cape Flats where the offence allegedly took place, refused to comment.

*Not his real name.

The Sunday Times has established that a police investigation is under way and the Western Cape Department of Education has launched its own investigation.

Republished from today’s Sunday Times.