Zephany’s kidnapper joins the jailbird A-listers
THE woman convicted of one of the most high-profile kidnapping cases in the world is to serve her jail term at a facility where the A-listers of prisoners, including Najwa Petersen and Dina Rodrigues, are being held.
The 52-year-old Lavender Hill woman, who cannot be named, was admitted to the Breede River women’s prison near Worcester on Wednesday, Breede River Management Area (BRMA) spokesman Simphiwe Xaphe confirmed.
The women’s prison, known as one of the cleaner and more comfortable facilities in the Western Cape, has been in the news on several occasions because of the high-profile prisoners held there. Rodrigues, who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating the 2005 murder of baby Jordan Norton, has been in the same prison since 2007. She received an outstanding achievement award at an academic graduation ceremony in 2012.
Rodrigues and Petersen were also featured in the press in 2009 when they sat together at a Women’s Day event in the prison, snacking and cracking jokes in their denim overalls.
Now the woman who kidnapped Zephany could become part of their inner circle, after she was transferred there from Pollsmoor Prison on Wednesday to begin serving her sentence.
Her husband refused to say how he felt about the move, saying on Thursday the family had decided not to speak to the media at all.
On Monday, Cape Judge President John Hlophe sentenced her to 14 years behind bars for the kidnapping, four of which were suspended.
Five years were imposed for fraud and an additional five years for the contravention of the Children’s Act.
However, since those sentences were ordered to run concurrently, her effective jail term amounted to 10 years, so far the harshest imposed in the Western Cape for a hospital kidnapping.
Judge Hlophe said he viewed the offences in a serious light, and pointed out that investigating officer Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Barkhuizen had testified about the prevalence of such crimes in society.
He said the harm caused to the Nurse family was immense. In terms of the law, the kidnapper becomes eligible for release on parole after serving half her sentence, even less if she gets time off for good behaviour or if any amnesties are granted during that period.
Until then, she will have to settle into her new home, about 120km from Lavender Hill. The kidnapping case made headlines inter nationally when Zephany was found by her biological family at the age of 17.
SAMANTHA Ashleen April did not get to celebrate Women’s Day. April, a Cape Town sex worker, was picked up by a male and female client on August 9 and was later found strangled.
She was one of 11 sex workers known to have been murdered this year, along with the 908 assaulted and 383 sexually assaulted or raped in one year in Joburg, Durban and Cape Town alone.
This was according to research provided by the Sex Workers’ Education and Advocacy Task force (Sweat).
The women are routinely picked up by police, driven around in their vans, raped, assaulted or kept in cells without access to legal representation or their families.
Their possessions, including antiretrovirals in the case of those who are HIV-positive, are taken, resulting in them defaulting on their treatment.
The problem, according to sex worker and Sweat human rights and lobbying officer Nosipho Vidima, is that sex workers have been waiting 19 years for promised legislative reform to ensure they enjoy their constitutional rights to freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, freedom from violence and the right to bodily integrity, among others.
An emotional Vidima was among sex workers who came to Parliament this week to plead with MPs on the multiparty women’s caucus to take up their call for the decriminalisation of sex work.
The high incidence of HIV among sex workers, despite government provision of prophylactics and ARVs, was a direct result of their vulnerability to rape by police, she argued.
More than this, sex workers were 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women.
“You give me ARVs, etc, but I still go out on street – I’m on the street and dead, healthy, but dead,” Vidima said.
Preventative measures were useless if police continued to rape sex workers, rendered more vulnerable by the criminal status of their occupation, she said.
But while the Commission on Gender Equality gave its backing to decriminalisation, as did MPs, the SA Law Reform Commission, which was asked to investigate the legal landscape relating to sexual offences and propose legislative and non-legislative alter natives, questioned whether it would have the desired results.
The commission’s lead researcher on the project, Deliene Clark, said countries that had tried decriminalisation were increasingly recognising the intrinsic “harm and exploitation” that went with prostitution.
In the Netherlands, the government was buying up windows in the famed red-light districts after recognising that its permissive legal framework was resulting in an increase in trafficking of women for the sex trade.
Violence continued “unabated” despite decriminalisation of prostitution because it was not possible to “neatly excise” it from other illegal activities, Clark said.
The socio-economic factors that concentrated crime in areas of poverty, inequality and unemployment continued to breed violence against women, she added.
Research had shown that while just 10 percent of men made up the clientele of the sex trade, this group was especially violent and prone to other illegal activities.