Hon Speaker and Mr President, Shakespeare has been much quoted in this House over the last two days and all that I can think of after listening to the hon Minister's speech now is the phrase that comes out of Macbeth, that her speech was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. [Applause.]
This debate takes place in the aftermath of the tragic and savage rape and murder of Anene Booysen. Anene is not the first child, nor the first woman, to suffer this terrible fate. Within the last two weeks Jo-Anne van Schalkwyk, an 18-year-old, was found raped, beaten and murdered in Atlantis. Ge-Audrey Green, a 19-year-old, was raped, murdered and stuffed in a drawer in Kraaifontein. Ofentse Mogale, an 11-year-old girl from Mmakau in Brits, was raped and murdered. Earlier, a young woman in Soshanguve was robbed and gang-raped on her way to register at the Tshwane University of Technology. Only last weekend, a 14-year-old girl was raped and murdered in a forest near her home in Jozini in KwaZulu-Natal.
South Africans are correctly and, entirely understandably, outraged. There are calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty and for the castration of sexual offenders because society demands an equally savage retribution for the perpetrators of these ghastly crimes. If not in fact, then at least perceptually, South Africa has earned the reputation as the world leader in crimes against women and children.
In 2009, Interpol was quoted as saying that South Africa had the highest rape rate among its member states. The National Development Plan quite correctly recognises the necessity of having an effective criminal justice system. It states, and I quote:
Inspiring public confidence in the criminal justice system is necessary to prevent crime and increase levels of safety. Public confidence is eroded by perceptions that criminals escape the law; that arrests do not lead to convictions; or that prisoners escape easily from courtrooms or correctional facilities.
These are not perceptions, Mr President. The reality is that far too few criminals are detected and apprehended; that too few of these are successfully prosecuted and convicted; and those that do land up in prison emerge more criminalised on release than they were when they were admitted.
As a result of their lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, many women do not report rape and other sexual offences. A 2005 study by the Medical Research Council found that only one in nine women reported that they had been raped. A more recent MRC study in Gauteng indicated that as few as 1 in 25 women reported these crimes.
So, only a fraction of rapes are reported at all. According to statistics released by the police, 64 514 sexual offences were reported in 2011-12, but according to the annual report of the National Prosecuting Authority, only 6 193 sexual offences cases were finalised, of which only 65% resulted in successful convictions. What this actually means is that only 4 025 cases resulted in a conviction, a rate of just 6,1% of cases initially reported to the police.
The women against whom these crimes were committed were let down by the system. They were let down because the Family Violence, Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Units, FCSUs, were abolished in 2006 and only re- established in 2011. They were let down because there aren't enough Thuthuzela Care Centres or specialised sexual offences courts and there are not enough police officers trained or police stations equipped to implement the Sexual Offences Act. They were also let down because the forensic laboratories were too slow to process evidence. Is it any wonder that so few women report rapes?
But the other reason that South Africans have very little faith in the criminal justice system is because the wrong people are put in charge of it. When a former National Police Commissioner was sentenced to 15 years for corruption, and his successor dismissed for his involvement in dodgy lease deals, people lose faith. When the Constitutional Court rules that the National Director of Public Prosecutions was not a fit and proper person to occupy that post, people lose faith. When the post of head of the Special Investigating Unit, SIU, is vacant for 14 months, people start to doubt the seriousness of the government to tackle corruption. When the National Prosecuting Authority, NPA, decided to discontinue a prosecution, a decision that was described by an eminent jurist as, I quote, "incomprehensible and indefensible", because the individual charged was about to become the President, people start to think that there's one law for the politically connected and another law for the man in the street. [Applause.]
Mr President, we need an honest conversation about crime against women and children, its causes, and how to fix the criminal justice system. But, more than this, South Africans demand action.
So, Mr President, when you said, correctly, that you would allocate courts and a prioritised roll for perpetrators of violent protests, and when you said, and I listened, and I quote, "the law will be enforced and seen to be enforce", will you do the same for perpetrators of crimes against women and children? Unless and until this happens, South Africans will not have confidence in the criminal justice system and in the politicians who are responsible for it. I thank you. [Applause.]