TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 10

Subsection 8

■ SEXUAL ABUSE

52 Given the close relationship between sex and gender, one of the more obvious differences in the way women and men might experience gross human rights violations is the extent to which they suffered from sexual violations, and the nature of those sexual violations. Of the 446 statements that were coded as involving sexual abuse, 398 specified the sex of the victim. Of these 158, or 40 per cent, were women. Rape was explicitly mentioned in over 140 cases.

53 The Commission regarded rape as ‘severe ill treatment’ regardless of the circumstances under which it occurred. Solitary confinement was the other abuse categorised in this way. The women who described how they had been raped while in detention were, in effect, often describing a double experience of those abuses regarded as most severe. Ms Thandi Shezi first had her hands and feet chained while she was assaulted.

Then they unchained me, and Sam took the white sack and put it on my head… they poured acid on this water that they were pouring on me and that acid got into my eye and today I can't see properly in the other eye ... they used this electrodes to choke me … until I bit my tongue and my tongue got torn … And one of them said, “We must just humiliate her and show her that this ANC can't do anything for her”… then the whole four of them started raping me whilst they were insulting me and using vulgar words and said I must tell them the truth.

54 Ms Phyllis Naidoo reported that, in 1976, when assisting child detainees, she came across several young women who had been raped and impregnated by the officers who detained them. Despite her offer of assistance, “they wouldn't (abort). They feared the special branch.”

55 Several women described how they had been sexually abused, although not necessarily raped, while in detention. Ms Evelyn Masego Thunyiswa was twenty-two years old in 1977 when she and others were detained by police on their way to Steve Biko’s funeral. She told the story at the special hearing on children and youth:

The other one came to me… and said, “Stand up! I want to see your vagina”, and they started hitting me with fists. After that, they electrocuted us… I can’t remember where did they apply this to my body because, when they switched it on, I felt as if my private parts were falling… While [I was] crying, they were sitting in front of me laughing .

56 Ms Funzani Joyce Marubini was a member of the Youth Congress in the Northern Province at the time of her detention in 1986. She and five other women were arrested.

They did not give us food, they did not give us water, they shut the toilets so that we could not go in there to relieve ourselves… that night, they came and woke us up and they switched off the lights and said we should lie on our stomachs. They started assaulting us with sjamboks [whips] … assaulting us on our buttocks up to the time that our panties were torn and our undergarments were exposed.

57 Their assailants said the reason they had undressed the women was that “they said they wanted to show us as to where Mandela is”.

58 Ms Nomvula Mokonyane was arrested and put into solitary confinement eleven days after her wedding and two months into her pregnancy. The district surgeons disputed the fact that she was pregnant. They said that her fallopian tube was blocked “and they had to make sure that they unblock them so that then you can begin to have menstruations; and if you begin to resist that then torture will take its own course.” Ms Sheila Segametsi Masote also miscarried in detention after being kicked and left “all bleeding, blood oozing down your legs and drying up there.”