Behind bars but still preying on women
● Their Facebook profiles are the model of respectability.
Samnkelo Ndondo describes himself as “well-dressed, in a relationship, prison warder”. Nkosinathi Nomane says: “Likes respect. Shy. Friendly. Kind and good with people.”
In fact, the 24-year-old friends are child rapists and kidnappers who have just started 25-year prison sentences.
Experts say their use of social media while behind bars is a way of continuing the predatory behaviour that led them to rape a 15-year-old at gunpoint. They abducted the teenager as she made her way home from a party in Cape Town in 2015.
Cellphones are banned in prisons, but the correctional services department says it cannot afford the equipment to detect them.
That effectively opens cell doors for inmates online. Sexual predator expert Marcel Londt said Ndondo and Nomane’s “flagrant disregard of the … limitations of incarceration” should be a wake-up call.
“It raises the question whether long-term incarceration as a standalone indeed creates safety for women and children,” said Londt, head of social work in the health sciences faculty at the University of the Western
Cape.
University of Cape Town gender-based violence expert Benita Moolman said: “It undermines the legislative process. If you are found guilty and you’re continuing to do this behaviour, they’re kind of saying to correctional services and to the justice system that we don’t care what you say, we don’t care if we’re convicted. We can demonstrate to you that we still have power to continue … violating women.”
On Monday March 24, Ndondo posted a status update accompanied by a photograph of him in Nike clothing. He scooped 23 “likes”, some from women.
Londt, who has interviewed dozens of incarcerated sex offenders, said this was typical of the way predators use social media to step back into society in sheep’s clothing.
“They hide in the open and what they present is this fantasised version of what they’re like. In a way it plays into their deep fantasies of recruitment, of selection,” she said.
Moolman said the men’s Facebook pages are designed to lure more victims. “One says he’s a prison warden. [That] is not necessarily going to scare any woman or a person that’s interested because that’s just a job, and the fact that he has a job is something that’s appealing to women,” she said.
“[The men] represent a particular kind of masculinity. One that is shy, one that has a job. And that can be appealing to women …
“It’s very dangerous because it gets used in that way and more women are victimised in the process, because already they are being lied to and sold a particular image.”
Londt said men like the two rapists, from Wallacedene in Kraaifontein, Cape Town, target vulnerable people who “have no idea what the extent of the manipulation, the deception and the pathology is with these people”.
The two men did not respond when the Sunday Times approached them on Facebook for comment.
Department of justice & correctional services spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo said Ndondo and Nomane’s cases were being investigated. “The department is considering various options to procure electronic devices to assist officials in the detection of cellphones being smuggled into correctional centres. However, financial constraints … are impacting on these plans.”