Via Bossip
It was supposed to be an ordinary night out with friends for 20-year-old Zukiswa Gaca but it ended with her lying on a railway track attempting to take her own life.
Gaca was at a bar, drinking with friends in Khayelitsha township, less than 40 kilometers outside Cape Town, South Africa, when a man tried to ask her out.
“I told the guy that no I’m a lesbian so I don’t date guys and then he said to me, ‘no I understand. I’ve got friends that are lesbians, that’s cool, I don’t have a problem with that.’”
Gaca says he was nice and she trusted him, and they left the bar to go to the home of one of his friends, and that is where his friendly exterior turned nasty.
“He said to me, ‘you know what? I hate lesbians and I’m about to show you that you are not a man, as you are treating yourself like a man,’” she told CNN
“I tried to explain ‘I’m not a man. I never said I’m a man, I’m just a lesbian’. And he said, ‘I will show you that I am a man and I have more power than you.’”
Then he raped her, she says, as his friend watched.
Gaca said: “[Afterwards] I went to the railway train road, because I was suicidal at the time. I was lying on the tracks. I think the train was 100 meters away from where I was. Then some other guy came and grabbed me. The train passed. He called the police.”
It is called “corrective rape” – where men force themselves on lesbians, believing it will change their sexual orientation.
The extent of the problem is hard to know as South African police do not compile corrective rape statistics separately from other rape cases.
But human rights groups in the country — where gay rights are constitutionally protected — are outraged.
Cherith Sanger, of the Women’s Legal Centre in Cape Town, which provides legal support for rape victims who cannot afford good lawyers, said: “We believe that corrective rape warrants greater recognition on the basis that there are multiple grounds of discrimination.
“It’s not just about a woman being raped in terms of violence against women, which is bad enough, but it’s also got to do with sexual orientation so it’s another ground or level of unfair discrimination leveled against lesbians.”
It was not the first time Gaca had been raped. She says she ran away from her home village, in the rural Eastern Cape, after the first rape when she was 15 years old and too afraid to press charges.
She says running was easier than dealing with a community that didn’t accept lesbians.
She moved to Khayelitsha Township, a sprawling shanty town near Cape Town, Africa’s “gay capital” where she hoped to find tolerance.
Instead, she was confronted by more hate. “Being a lesbian in Khayelitsha is like you are being treated like an animal, like some kind of an alien or something,” she said.
While there are no official statistics on corrective rape, there have been enough publicly reported incidents to spark widespread alarm.
This time Gaca is fighting back.
New York-based Human Rights Watch recently conducted interviews in six of South Africa’s nine provinces and concluded: “Social attitudes towards homosexual, bisexual, and transgender people in South Africa have possibly hardened over the last two decades. The abuse they face on an everyday basis may be verbal, physical, or sexual — and may even result in murder.”
The group added: “This is a far cry from the promise of equality and non-discrimination on the basis of ‘sexual orientation’ contained in the country’s constitution.”
Most known victims, like Gaca, are poor and black and so are the perpetrators, prompting many to ask how a people who fought against discrimination during apartheid can today treat some of its most vulnerable in such a violent manner.
Siphokazi Mthathi, South African director at Human Rights Watch, said: “We’ve failed to make it understood that there is a price for rape. Sexism is still deeply embedded here. There is still a strong sense among men that they have power over women, women’s bodies and there’s also a strong sense that there’s not going to be consequences because most often there are no consequences.”
Interpol estimates that half of South African women will be raped in their lifetime.
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