A South African victim of "corrective rape."
Some stories are so sad and tragic that you just gape. Here is a report from Reuters:
Gangs of South African men are raping lesbians in the belief it will “cure” the women’s sexual orientation, an aid agency said Friday. NGO ActionAid said in a report titled “Hate Crimes: the rise of corrective rape in South Africa” lesbians were increasingly at risk of rape, particularly in South African townships where homosexuality is largely taboo.
South Africa has one of the world’s most progressive constitutions and became the first country in Africa to allow gay marriage in 2006, but homosexuality is still widely frowned upon and same-sex unions are often decried as “un-African.”
The brutal rape and murder last year of female soccer player Eudy Simelane, a lesbian, threw a spotlight on homophobic violence, particularly toward women.
“We get insults every day, beatings if we walk alone, you are constantly reminded that you deserve to be raped,” ActionAid quoted one lesbian as saying. “They yell, ‘if I rape you then you will go straight, you will buy skirts and start to cook because you will have learnt how to be a real woman’.”
Patricia Nell Warren has been writing about Simelane’s case for Outsports for the past year. The NGO report Friday said as many as 10 rapes to “cure” lesbians happen each week in Cape Town alone.
Click here for a video of South African victims of “corrective rape” describing the terror.
on Mar 13th, 2009 at 8:12 PM
Sickening is the key word here. Rape victims, primarily women who are abused in a variant of ways will often go back and befriend their attacker. It’s just the human mind.
The idea of raping a woman so that she will magically go straight is as twisted as ex-gay therapy which has been medically ruled out as useless as a blind race horse.
I mean, if you honestly want to relate it to gay men, it would be like me taking a gay man to a strip bar with topless women. It won’t do anything for him.
on Mar 14th, 2009 at 5:22 AM
I agree with DJ — “sickening” is the word I’d use. But South Africans aren’t the only men who try this tactic with lesbian women. It happens in the United States too. It’s typical of the twisted attitude that men are taught in many cultures — that violence against women is not only acceptable, but that women actually like it. How many of us have seen movies with “love scenes” where a man forces himself on a woman, and she resists at first, and finally gets turned on? Sickening.
on Mar 14th, 2009 at 5:55 AM
Like James Bond movies?
on Apr 16th, 2009 at 4:20 AM
I agree with DJ and Patricia, it makes me sick and mad, I can kill, those bustards, that rape women,it doesn’t matter if it is gay,lesbian or straight. I am straight,but am I gang up against gays rape them to get real men?No because we are all human. My wish is that we must gang up against those who think they are straight, they are the ones that is straight. When I read about gang rape on women,lesbians,gays and children, babies that knows nothing, I want that men or who ever did that to be punished publical. They must be given to the people, to do the same that they do to women and children.