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TRC Final Report

Page Number (Original) 170

Paragraph Numbers 21 to 24

Volume 1

Chapter 6

Part Appendix2

Subsection 5

What did they talk about?

21 Deponents came to the Commission to tell about gross violations of human rights that had been experienced, either by themselves or by someone close to them. In total, the 21 000 statements made to the Commission contained nearly 38 000 allegations of gross violations of human rights32, of which nearly 10 000 were killings.

31 i.e. those below the legal age of majority. 32 The total number of violations reported is a count of all gross violations reported, whether the Commission found the violation to be a gross violation in terms of the Act or not. We are only considering deponents’ testimony here, not the final decisions of the commission. In addition to gross violations, deponents also described several thousand ‘associated’ violations that do not fall into the categories specified by the Act. These have been excluded from this analysis.

22 The table below shows the number of violations, fatal and non-fatal33, reported by deponents and who suffered from the violation:

23 Men were the most common victims of violations. Six times as many men died as women and twice as many survivors of violations were men34. Hence, although most people who told the Commission about violations were women, most of the testimony was about men. The graph below shows clearly how the testimony of women deponents differed from that of men:

33 Non-fatal human rights violations include attempted killings, torture, severe ill treatment and abductions. 34 The large numbers of victims of unspecified sex are a consequence of the time-pressures on Commission staff to load the data onto the computer systems. With more time and resources, this data can be improved. However, it is very likely that the proportion of men to women victims amongst those of unspecified sex is the same as that where the sex is known, so the overall results are not likely to be significantly affected by the unknowns.

24 Most men who came to the Commission reported violations they had experienced, whereas women tended to talk about violations experienced by others. This is not to say that women did not suffer violations themselves - they certainly did suffer - but the focus of women’s testimony was more often about someone other than themselves and those victims tended to be men.35

 
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