More than 1 000 women are raped in South Africa every day. Around 150 of those women will report the crime to the police. Fewer than 30 of the cases will be prosecuted and no more than 10 will result in a conviction. This translates into an overall conviction rate of 4-8 percent of reported cases. So what happens to all the other cases?

Rape Unresolved: Policing sexual offences in South Africa, authored by Professor Dee Smythe, director of research in the Law Faculty, is concerned with the question of police discretion and how its exercise shapes the criminal justice response to rape in South Africa.

The book launch on 12 May at UCT’s Faculty of Law, saw Dee and Dr Kelley Moult, director of the Centre for Law and Society, discuss these areas of discretion in a highly engaging and interesting way.

These quotes from the book reveal some of the insights Dee acquired in the process of researching and writing this ground-breaking publication.

“Not every act of victimisation is prosecuted. We don’t expect it to be… we accept that for a range of reasons attrition happens in the criminal justice system, so that not all reported cases are prosecuted, or result in conviction… In the case of a woman who withdraws her complaint on Monday morning because she has sobered up and reconciled with the perpetrator, and the woman who withdraws her complaint because of police incompetence and apathy – the official outcome, written on the docket, and captured in police statistics is the same in in both instances : ‘withdrawn complaint’. But the locus of responsibility and the degree of agency exercised by victims differs markedly.”

“The apparent failure of the criminal justice system to adequately deal with sexual violence, as evidenced by low reporting rates, poor throughput and consistently low conviction rates, has become a cipher for the system’s apathy towards sexual violence and disregard for rape complaints.”

“The threshold of what constitutes ‘real rape’ will be different in contexts where the cultural and normative dimensions of appropriate sexual conduct are more accepting of violence and coercion. This is even more true when there is a pervasive belief that violence is a way of life for some communities and that therefore women who are members of these ‘violence-prone’ groups will not be traumatised by rape or battering as other women.”

“Case withdrawals confront us with the complexity of the engagement between victims and the criminal justice system. At times, we see genuine concern for the well-being of the victim and the imperative to build a strong case. On the other side, a lack of knowledge/skills/training, stereotyping, bad practices, and institutional shortcuts all come together to undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system.”

“Claims that women make false reports of rape go back centuries and the notion that they do so is strongly entrenched among those tasked with investigating their complaints…The cases in this study show that false allegations occur in more complex contexts and are often informed by more diffuse motivations than simplistic and stereotypical accounts would suggest.”

Photos Patrick King