BREDASDORP, South Africa — As Anene Booysen lay dying, she whispered to her
medics the name of the man who had assaulted her and left her lying in the dirt
on a construction site, her bowels spilling from her abdomen.
“Zwai,” Ms. Booysen, 17, told at least two people
before she died. Zwai — the nickname of a close friend, Jonathan Davids — and
his friends had done this to her, she said.
The next day, the police arrested Mr. Davids, 22, and
another man, charging them with rape and murder.
The attack, in February, produced such revulsion and
outrage that it quickly became a national symbol of the epidemic of violence
against women in South Africa, much as other recent cases have forced national
soul-searching on sexual violence plaguing India, Egypt and Brazil.
With the swift arrest of two suspects, hopes were high
that the attack on Ms. Booysen would be prosecuted quickly. But just as the
trial was about to start last week, the prosecutors made a dramatic
announcement. Despite Ms. Booysen’s dying declaration, they did not have enough
evidence to prosecute Mr. Davids, and he was set free.
“We understand the sense of shock and outrage that was
induced by the incident,” Eric Ntabazalila, a spokesman for the National
Prosecuting Authority, told reporters. “However, as the prosecution we can
only prosecute successfully on sufficient evidence.”
The trial of the second suspect began Monday, but the
failure of prosecutors to make a case against Mr. Davids has shaken the
public’s faith in South Africa’s ability to address its rape problem and hold
perpetrators accountable.
“Everybody is terribly disappointed and feels
incredibly let down,” said Rachel Jewkes, an expert on violence against women
at the South African Medical Research Council. “The question is, did the police
really go all out to investigate?”
About 64,000 cases of sexual assault are reported here
each year, and South Africa has one of the highest rates of nonpartner rapes in
the world. But studies show that number vastly understates the epidemic,
suggesting that hundreds of thousands of cases are not reported. Of those that
are, fewer than 10 percent result in convictions, a product, analysts say, of
shoddy police work and ineffective prosecution by a criminal justice system
that has largely failed to take crime against women seriously.
The dismal conviction rate leaves victims feeling
helpless, Ms. Jewkes said.
“Many women wonder why they should bother to report,”
she said.
Like many others in Bredasdorp, a dusty, remote farming
town about 100 miles southeast of Cape Town, Ms. Booysen had a difficult
childhood. Her mother died when she was young, and she was passed between
relatives and bounced in and out of foster homes, relatives and neighbors said.
She dropped out of high school, and like many young
people here, where jobs are hard to come by but alcohol and drugs are
omnipresent, she spent her days idly drinking cheap beer and wine with friends.
The day she was attacked was no different.
On the afternoon of Feb. 1, Ms. Booysen was at a
neighborhood bar, witnesses said. So was Mr. Davids, though the two had not
arrived together, and were not seen drinking together, the witnesses said.
Another young man, Johannes Kana, was also there.
Early the next morning, Ms. Booysen was found at a
construction site near her house, bleeding and near death. She was taken to the
hospital but died that day.
What happened after she left the bar is disputed. In an
interview, Mr. Davids said that he saw Ms. Booysen at the bar, but did not
drink with her, did not know the people she was with and did not see when she
left. He said he left the bar to continue drinking at a friend’s house. Mr.
Kana admitted raping Ms. Booysen, according to the government, but denies
killing her. He has been charged with rape and murder and is now the only
suspect on trial.
The National Prosecuting Authority did not respond to
multiple requests for comment in the case.
Ms. Booysen’s rape and murder brought a furious
response. The singer Annie Lennox led a protest march in Cape Town. A radio
station played a chime every four minutes as a reminder to listeners of how
often a woman is raped in South Africa. Politicians gave speeches expressing
shock and promising tough new actions to protect women and girls from
predators.
“The whole nation is outraged at this extreme violation
and destruction of a young human life,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement. “This act is shocking, cruel and most
inhumane. It has no place in our country. We must never allow ourselves to get
used to these acts of base criminality to our women and children.”
Despite the protestations of politicians, such crimes
are neither new nor uncommon. A 2009 study by the Medical
Research Council found that one-quarter of men admitted to raping someone,
and nearly half of those men said they had raped more than once.
One research study on a small town in Mpumalanga
Province examined about 250 reported rapes from 2005 to 2007. More than half of
the victims were minors. Arrests were made in 60 percent of the cases, but more
than two-thirds of those cases were dropped and never came to trial. Ultimately
only nine of the accused were convicted, and only seven received jail
sentences. Several men were suspects in five or six different rape cases. None
of those cases ever made it to court, the study found.
Analysts point to the history and culture of South
Africa, a deeply patriarchal society that devalues crimes against women and
where 19 years after the end of apartheid the criminal justice system is still struggling
to transform itself from a security force aimed mainly at protecting the white
minority into a professional crime-fighting organization.
The police do not take rape allegations seriously and
fail to perform basic detective work, like collecting forensic evidence, said
Lisa Vetten, a researcher who worked on the Mpumalanga study. Victims are
intimidated by perpetrators, who are quickly released on bail. Prosecutors shy
away from taking tough cases, especially those where physical evidence is not available.
In some cases, appellate court judges set aside guilty
verdicts because they simply do not believe the victim. Two young men in
Limpopo Province were convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl in the bushes near
her home in 2007. The girl had been walking to a public telephone when the two
men waylaid her, forced her into the bushes and took turns assaulting her,
according to the appeals court record.
But in 2012, an appellate court judge set aside the
conviction because her account of the assault “has some defects which cannot be
ignored.” The victim had failed to run away or scream to passers-by, the judge
said. She made up the story about being raped, the judge reasoned, to explain
the bleeding from the loss of her virginity.
“It is fascinating that a judge would believe that a
girl would wish to have her first sexual experience with two men she never met
in a bush,” Ms. Vetten said. “The judge simply decided, without any real
evidence to support it, that she made it up.”
As to Ms. Booysen’s dying testimony pointing to Mr.
Davids, the prosecution has offered no further public explanation as to why the
case against him was dropped.
Mr. Davids, glassy-eyed and reeking of alcohol in the
middle of a recent afternoon, was smoking marijuana and fuming about the case.
He seemed to regret what happened to Ms. Booysen, who he said was “like a
sister” to him, and insisted he had nothing to do with the crime.
What was bothering him was that he spent four months in
jail as a suspect, which he found devastating.
“I have nothing left inside me to feel,” he said. “My pain is so deep I can’t go any further.”