‘Dad raped me, shot me twice’

MELANIE is an angry young woman, and she has good reason to feel that she got a false start in life. Sometimes she wishes she had never gotten out of the starting blocks.

She came from a wealthy family and lived in a lovely home in Cape Town, but her childhood memories and events in her adult life sometimes overwhelm her.

“Every day I think about it (suicide), but these painkiller tablets I take to take away the pain don’t kill me. I have taken so many of them, but I still wake up the next day. I don’t know why I was put on this earth to suffer...to relive it every day...”

What Melanie, 33, relives each day is the day she turned 16. That afternoon her mother rushed her and her younger brother to pack because they were going to run away from home.

“I had a feeling back then that my dad was abusing her, but we never really saw anything. She was the perfect wife.

My mother said ‘we are going to go now, we must leave!’ but then he pulled the car in the driveway and dragged her by her hair into the house. I ran after her with my brother.

He murdered my mother next to me, he raped her, raped me and shot me twice, stabbed me 30 times and left me for dead, but unfortunately, I don’t know why, I did not die,” she said. Someone saw, but looked away. Melanie was in a coma in hospital for a month, and because she grew up isolated from relatives no-one came to visit her at Groote Schuur Hospital, so she discharged herself, and took to the streets of Wynburg.

One day Melanie managed to track down her younger brother, who was also living on the streets, but this was no happy brother and sister reunion. He had become addicted to tik and whoonga, and spent most nights looking for more drugs.

“My brother does not want me near him because I am a constant reminder of what happened that day. He is a bit crazy now,’’ she said.

On the streets she realised how vulnerable homeless people are. She was raped and when she reported it, she was told she was “asking” for it by living on the streets, as though this was her choice.

“Nobody helps you on the street, they walk past you like they are smelling shit. There are a lot of people on the streets who are doing drugs, drinking and stealing, but we are not all like that. When you put on your CV that you stay at a shelter, you never get a chance,” she said.

Melanie was married briefly to a man she met on the streets, hoping he could make her happy. Instead he beat her, and she ran away after losing her cashier job because no one wants their pizza served by a woman covered in bruises.

“If you are in a marriage and you get abused, the first time it happens you are a victim, but the second time you are volunteer. I was sick and tired of being a volunteer,” Melanie said.

She has been at shelter for four months

‘I smell the blood from that day and it all comes back to me.’ ‘Stop walking away when you see something abusive happening’