It’s their right to rape
137 954 residents. But, four years later, those who live here, including Skosana, believe the number has grown closer to 600 000.
Skosana stops in front of a shack in which an illegal shebeen operates. “Criminals who need a place to hide, they come to Diepsloot.
“We are all just squeezed together here,” he says and picks up a rolling football to hand it to a boy running after it.
Everywhere, men and women are sitting around. A boy and girl play with a plastic scooter. On the wall of a cellphone repair shop the word “SEX” is scrawled in purple capital letters. Below it drips another phrase: “Life is shit.”
The 2011 census found that only about half of Diepsloot’s inhabitants have jobs. But again, Skosana believes, it’s “much less”.
“When people are bored, they’re dangerous,” he warns. “For some men here, rape has become like a sport — a form of entertainment, like a hobby. And alcohol, which is available everywhere in Diepsloot from shebeens and spaza shops, fuels it.”
The policeman’s statements are not unsubstantiated. In a 2010 study published in the South African Crime Quarterly, men who admitted to raping were asked their reasons for doing so. More than half of those who had raped a girl younger than 15 said they did so “to have fun” or “as part of a game”.
“Boredom” was an explanation for a third of rapes, and was an even more common motivation when children were raped.
Although the study didn’t find alcohol to be a cause of rape, it found it to be an important “contextual factor”.
One out of three men revealed there had been no consequences for their rapes and did not show remorse for their actions. Only one in eight of the men who had raped were jailed.
Since last month, a few police members have begun to fill up the new police station. They’re too few to occupy even half the building and most of the staff is administrative.
“It’s impossible to police a big place like Diepsloot properly at the moment,” Skosana says. “Usually this entire place is being patrolled by only two police vehicles — there are only two staff members in each vehicle. How can four policemen be responsible for 600 000 people?”
Thuso Kgosi’s* face lights up as he sits on a double bed in his mother’s shack. Next to him, a rickety table holds a small television that plays the signature song of his favourite soap opera, Skeem Saam. It’s 6:30pm and his mother is cooking samp and beans.
“There’s a boy loving a girl in this programme!” Thuso shouts with his arms up in the air, giggling. “Mangolisa is the boy and Lelo is the girl.”
Naledi Kgosi* and her four children live in this one-room shack in the backyard of someone’s RDP house in Extension 2. There are five other shacks on the same property.
Thuso is different from her other children. He has Down’s syndrome. He looks about 13 — three years younger than his true age.
Twice a week, Naledi works as a domestic worker in Fourways, an affluent suburb barely 10km from Diepsloot. One evening, about five months ago, when Naledi returned from work, Thuso complained of constipation. His mother wanted to help him by using a “traditional cure” of inserting a stick in his anus “to loosen up things”.
But before doing so, she noticed that his anus was “very, very red and swollen”.
Naledi turns around where she’s cooking and places her hands on her hips. “I asked him if he was sore and he told me, ‘There’s this man who is putting his penis in my anus. Every time he does that he gives me 20 cents.’”
Naledi sits on a rusted collapsible chair. She looks at Thuso. “I know
this man did this to my son because my son’s mentally disabled. The perpetrator knows the law will not trust my son’s word against his,” she sighs.
The rapist lives just up the road, about 150m from the Kgosis’ home. The morning after she discovered Thuso had been violated, Naledi reported it to the Diepsloot police. “They promised they would investigate the case. But I have heard nothing from the police since and no one has been arrested.”
Throughout Diepsloot, that’s a familiar refrain.
Naledi gets up to give the samp and beans a stir. “I don’t know how many times this man has raped Thuso,” she laments, and knocks the spoon on the side of the pot to clean it. “This thing is filling me with pain, especially since Thuso told me once, ‘Mommy, you know, I was starting to enjoy that sex thing.’ ” She bends over and cries. Like most mothers in Diepsloot, Naledi is a single parent. The fathers of her children play no role in their lives. “I must cope with this alone now,” she says. “I wanted to tell Thuso’s father about this, but whenever I try to speak with him on the phone he just puts it off. He’s not interested.”
Brown Lekekela, a wellspoken man i n his early 30s, eases behind his small desk i n the Wendy house i n his backyard.
“What leads to a lot of Diepsloot’s problems is that children here grow up without fatherly love,” he says. “Diepsloot’s children put their trust in strangers who can abuse them. To them, they are not strangers, they are their uncles, because they give them five bob, buy them sweets — things that their fathers never did.”
Across from Lekekela is a neat single bed. A paper poster of a blond, turquoise-eyed Jesus is up on the wall. Rainbow rays shine out of Christ’s heart. A statue of the Virgin Mary wearing a baby-blue cloak watches over the cottage from the top of a chest of drawers in the opposite corner.
This is the makeshift headquarters of the Green Door, which Lekekela manages. It helps abused women and children to report the crimes against them to the police, and to get healthcare.
Lekekela is the Green Door’s only counsellor.
“Many child rapes in Diepsloot don’t get reported because children — and often adults too — think this is the way that men are meant to treat kids. Rape is a normal part of life here,” he says.
On Lekekela’s desk there’s a file filled with certificates of counselling and project management courses he has completed. He frequently works through the night. His is often the first kind face that those who have been raped, see. He is the link between them and the police and the hospital.
But Lekekela doesn’t get paid to run the Green Door. The organisation receives no funding.
“T h e p r o v i n c i a l g o v e r n me n t helped us with this building, about two years ago. Since then the officials come here, they ask what we need, I tell them, they fill in forms, they leave. But no money comes,” he says softly, and incongruously smiles.
“Mostly, rapists here don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. They think it’s their right to rape. They argue, ‘What is the problem if I have given this child or woman money?’ ”
Lekekela fetches a journal. In it are the names and contact details of people the Green Door has helped. There are many, written in different shades of ink.
“When children and women come here, they still smell like the rapist’s sweat,” he explains. “They will be bleeding and would have scars all over their faces and their private parts would regularly be torn apart.”
He opens the book and shakes his head. “It’s absolutely terrible.”
Most victims have one thing in common: they come from single-parent households. “It’s rare to find a family in Diepsloot headed by a father. They mostly don’t hang around. They leave the children with the mothers — like, its women’s work to look after babies,” he says, scoffing.
In South Africa, it’s unusual for children to live with both biological parents.
According to Statistics South Africa, only 36.4% of children experience life with two parents. When black children are isolated in this research, that figure is even lower: fewer than one out of three black youngsters (31%) stay with their mothers and fathers.
There are no official figures available for Diepsloot but Lekekela believes the proportion of children growing up in households with two parents is “considerably lower” than the national estimate.
“Come with me today and we visit random homes and I can guarantee you almost 100% that in eight out of 10 we will not find the father,” he says emphatically.
The murdered toddlers, Zanele and Yonelisa Mali, never knew their fathers. They made zero financial contributions to their wellbeing, and never even attended their funerals, say their mothers.
The man who killed the Mali cousins also grew up without a father. In mitigation of his sentence, he pointed out that he was raised by his grandmother and was left “heartbroken” when his father denied paternity. Molested 16-year-old Thuso’s father last made contact with him in 2004. He has never paid child maintenance.
A fatherless community, according to a 2009 Medical Research Council (MRC) policy brief, gives rise to “intergenerational cycling of violence”. Studies have repeatedly shown that children raised by one parent are far more likely to experience emotional or physical abuse than those who have two parent figures. But, at the same time, research has also revealed that children who have been abused are more likely to become abusers themselves.
The MRC document explains the vicious circle: “Girls exposed to physical, sexual and emotional trauma as children are at increased risk of revictimisation as adults” and “exposure of boys to abuse, neglect or sexual violence in childhood greatly increases the chance of their being violent as adolescents and adults”.
In 2009, the MRC was the joint author of a study conducted among men i n the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. One out of three men admitted to having raped a woman or girl. More than half of them reported they had been har- assed or bullied as children. Most rapists also perceived their parents to be “significantly less kind”.
Back in Diepsloot, Glenys van Halter has been working with sexually abused children for 25 years. She’s a feisty lay counsellor and “creative therapist”, using art to help victims to deal with their emotions.
A few months ago, Van Halter was working at a primary school in the township when a lot of noise emanated from a classroom where a teacher had briefly left the pupils alone. Van Halter went to investigate.
As she entered the room, she saw an eight-year-old boy standing in front of a girl of the same age. He was trying to force her to her knees. His trousers were down. “He had her by the hair and was smacking her and shouting, ‘You will suck this because I want to know!’ ” Van Halter recalls.
She says she demanded of the boy: “What do you want to know?” He answered: “At home tonight I have to do this. So I want to know what it feels like.”
Van Halter explains: “Those same absent fathers are the rapists and guys who end up in jail. And so it’s perpetuated generation after generation after generation, because the men who do this had no good role models themselves. They grew up