Baby Rape

All rape is horrendous. All violations of person are horrendous.

There is no acceptable rape and no gradations of unacceptability.

One writer observes that we are a Godless nation, another that the government has it’s priorities skewed and all find themselves incapable of expressing the full extent of their horror especially as parents of babies and toddlers. And yet none states what (s)he will do personally to end this sort of event: society should do something or the government or the police.

It is this sort of thinking that preserved apartheid, that made Hitler Fuhrer and that makes our problems apparently intractable. It is thinking that someone else must solve the problem.

Schelling points out that the good gets done if individuals act alone to do the right thing: no central command, no over-arching authority or organisation is needed to accomplish the apparently Herculean; only ordinary people acting on conscience.

We condemn. We complain. We pray.

Do we act? Not to punish but to prevent? Have readers and listeners asked themselves what they will do to prevent this happening to someone else?

One must know despair and desperation first-hand. Those who suffer do not do so vicariously….

I am indeed my brother’s keeper. And in this we are all guilty, all diminished, our horror notwithstanding.

[This letter appeared in The Star (South African Daily, Johannesburg) in October 2003.]

[Context: there had been a report of a rape of a 1 year old baby with significant physical injuries. Rape is common in South Africa and survivors of rape are getting younger because of the mistaken belief that HIV/AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Younger age is a proxy for virginity.]