Deserve to be raped’
drinking heavily to deal with the trauma they have experienced, but their drinking makes it harder for them to escape the violence in their lives.”
Mbete’s aunt, her mother’s sister, raised her. She never knew her mother; her father died of an “unexplained illness” when she was a toddler. She was severely neglected as a child and only started school at the age of 11. By the time she was 18, Mbete was pregnant. She never returned to school.
Being maltreated as a child significantly increased Mbete’s chances of being raped as an adult, research has shown. Where abused boys are more likely to become abusers as adults, such girls have a high risk of being re-victimised as women, giving rise to an intergenerational cycle of violence.
Other than the session with Lekekela, a lay counsellor, Mbete hasn’t received mental help.
When she reported her rape to the Diepsloot police the next morning, she recalls a social worker, who was supposed to help her, shouting: “You are lying, you drunkard! You are just jealous because your boyfriend left you for another girl.”
Mbete acknowledges she’s unlikely to seek further help. It’s not surprising. Less than 10% of disadvantaged women with alcohol and other drug disorders try to access mental health treatment, 2014 research in BioMed Central Psychiatry shows.
Mbete had endured three years of both physical and sexual abuse during her on-off relationship with Macia.
“Every time after he beat me, or forced me to do sexual things I didn’t want to do, I would leave,” she says. “But I would always return.”
The less help an abused woman receives, an article in the 2007 Journal of American College Health concludes, the higher the likelihood she’ll turn to alcohol to cope with her trauma and suffer further abuse.
Mbete finally left Macia “for good” when he beat her up after she accused him of impregnating one of her friends.
“I’m scared he’ll come and kill me,” she says, swallowing another mouthful of beer from the bottle that’s now almost empty. “I’m staying at different houses and don’t go to places he goes to. I don’t know what else to do.”
Her fears are justified, says Hatcher. “The moment just after
leaving an abusive partner places a woman at most risk of additional violence.”
Studies have shown that up to three-quarters of women who are killed by their abusers are murdered when they attempt to separate from, or soon after they have left, an abusive relationship.
Macia was arrested after Mbete laid a charge of rape against him. But the police set him free a few hours later.
Mbete murmers: “Few people believe that I was raped. The police said there wasn’t enough evidence.”
She made the mistake of washing herself before reporting the incident, destroying blood, semen, saliva or hair that could be used as proof.
Mbete says as she left the Diepsloot police station, Macia was waiting outside.
He glared at her, in front of the police, and shouted at her: “You are very brave to have opened a case against me, baby! Just wait and see what will happen.”
All that’s left of the Saturday summer sun is a distant, pink skyline. A young boy grilling mealie cobs over glowing coals lights a torch to better inspect the food.
Nightlife in the township is beginning.
Inside Lengaka Tavern the jukebox blasts a Brenda Fassie song. Men sit next to a triple-storey of SAB crates, eyes glued to a television screen. They’re watching a soccer match, beers in hand.
“It’s month end,” Lengaka laughs as he stands at the entrance to his tavern. “Soon my place will be so full you won’t be able to see the pool table. Right now people are still busy doing their shopping.”
On the other side of the township, among the dense rows of shacks in Extension 1, Mbete shambles around a friend’s home. It’s now about two years since she was raped.
She’s 23, and her stomach reveals a small bump. She fiddles self-consciously with the sequins on her hat, and says: “I’m almost four months pregnant.”
The father of the baby is one of Mbete’s recent boyfriends. “I’m sleeping with a whole lot of different men because I don’t have a stable place to stay. I live in different places with different men. They all have other women. That’s how I survive. I jump from place to place.”
Her older child lives with her father’s family, but she never sees her.
Mbete sits down on a crate next to her friend’s bed. She’s surrounded by plastic bags of clothes, unwashed laundry, cooking pots and a bed pan. Her eyes offer a deep blankness.
“If you are a woman in Extension 1 without a job,” she says, “to survive you must sell sex.”
The Diepsloot study showed that when men exchange items such as cellphones or food for sex, it triples the odds of them beating or raping a woman.
Mbete walks outside to sit on a washed-out couch in front of the shack. “It’s either you are a sex worker or you sleep with other women’s husbands and boyfriends, so they can give you some money for you and your kids.”
More potential violence isn’t the only problem she faces.
The type of transactional sex Mbete has more than doubles the possibility that she’ll be infected with HIV and increases the likelihood of her having sex while being drunk threefold, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of the International Aids Society.
She’s unlikely to be in a position where she can demand that her sex partners, on whom she’s dependent for survival, use condoms.
A corrugated iron door bangs in the breeze. Nearby is an empty paint bucket that people fill up with water to wash themselves behind the door.
Mbete hasn’t seen José Macia again, but she says she will “never stop hiding” from him.
She murmurs: “I still drink a lot. There’s nothing more I can do. I’m just waiting around, breathing.”
But Mbete lives in a place that offers her almost no constructive way of coping with the traumatic aftermath of her rape.
There are state health clinics in only two of the township’s 13 extensions and, according to the Sonke study’s social audit, neither of them offer post-rape care. Other than the services offered by five nongovernmental organisations with limited funds, Diepsloot doesn’t have any public mental health or addiction services.
There’s not a single official shelter for abused women. Lekekela’s overnight, self-funded temporary facility is the best on offer here.
Soon, Mbete will leave her friend’s shack to meet one of her boyfriends in a shebeen. He’ll buy her some of her favourite Zamalek beers and give her a place to sleep for the night, but she knows that, depending on his needs, she may not get much sleep.
Mbete packs her bag slowly and says: “Men have power over me because of money. If you have that, you can do what you want with women over here. If I am to survive, I have to obey the men and do everything they tell me.”
In her bright green top that still fits loosely over her expanding tummy, Mbete will wander through the community where the Sonke study shows seven out of 10 men think they’ve got the right to tell a woman what clothes to wear, and to control her movements.
Near the end of her journey, on a dark gravel road without street lights, she will pass a concrete wall on which someone has drawn a crude depiction of a sex act.
In the life-sized picture, a naked woman is on the ground, one leg up in the air. The man, approaching the woman from the back, is holding his erect penis and moving it towards her vagina.
Five teardrops fall from her eyes. Below the man’s sex organ is an arrow connecting it with an inscription: “AK 47, 9m”. In a bubble emerging from his mouth are the words: “Nice bang.”
The woman’s bubble reads: “Yebo!”