I think reporting in this country is itself a form of trauma. So it's like trauma on trauma.
125 of the 127 survivors and family members surveyed, who reported abuse to police said they faced problems trying to do so:
86 % said police did not explain their rights
82 % said police failed to treat them with sensitivity, dignity, and urgency
38 % said that police discouraged them from opening an official case against their abuser
Many survivors reported failures of the South African Police Service at the very first step of the justice process: reporting an assault. A quarter of survivors and family members surveyed said that the police never even registered their case.
Officers advised survivors to find a solution with the perpetrator rather than open a formal case and “waste government resources.” In some instances, this led to further violence.
Even when survivors succeed in registering their case, the reporting experience is often retraumatizing. Survivors reported that after long wait times at the station, they often had to share their story with male police officers, who did not demonstrate the sensitivity, dignity, and urgency required in gender-based violence cases. These officers frequently failed to explain survivors’ rights as victims or the next steps in their case.
They [the police] are busy with more important murder cases… they can’t help her with her domestic issues, she must sort it out herself. This is what they told her and led to her death, the very reason she’s no longer with us today.
Survivor from Atlantis
A survivor from Atlantis, who wished to remain anonymous, reported that she endured years of abuse at the hands of her partner. She told our researchers that police failed to respond to multiple phone calls, even when she was in immediate danger. In one incident, she had locked herself and her children in a room as he tried to attack them and called the police. To the background noise of her partner trying to kick down the door, the operator refused to send police out to her address.
“This lady asked me, ‘but did he hurt you?’ And I told her ‘no, he didn’t hurt me yet, but he wants to hurt me.’ And she told me to phone back whenever he has hurt me.”
She said her neighbors also called the police but were told that no one would come to that address because she was wasting their time.
After weeks of attending court daily, she managed to obtain a protection order, only for her abuser to continually violate it with no consequences. She says he has never seen the inside of a court room, despite her repeated attempts to file criminal cases. The survivor, however, is not deterred in her fight for justice.
“I say this every day: a bully doesn’t get born a bully; a rapist, he’s not born a rapist. It’s how systems fail our children, and our children grow up and they become angry adults, and it’s like a chain reaction.”
“I will always fight; I will never give up.”
Mother of gender-based violence victim from Atlantis
Liezel Duiter, who wished to be identified, shared the story of her daughter who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child. Liezel’s daughter had endured abuse by her ex-boyfriend on multiple occasions before the incident but never reported it “because she was a very quiet, to herself, type of person.” When the ex-boyfriend found out she had a new partner, he decided to confront the man and “interrogated the boyfriend about my daughter.” A fight broke out between the men, and the ex-boyfriend stabbed the other man, who had to be hospitalized due to his injuries.
“He, the perpetrator, then came to my house the next day to tell me what happened and saying that he didn’t mean to as he doesn’t know how to stab someone, never in his life did he do something like this before… My husband then took him to the police station to hand himself over, but when we got to the police station, a police woman told him [the perpetrator] to leave his address… because my daughter’s boyfriend has not yet been released from hospital and that they are waiting for the J88 form [medical examination] from the doctor that the police needs to fill in. And only then will they go and pick him [the perpetrator] up.”
The following Monday, only a week after this initial incident, Liezel was in hospital for treatment.
“I wasn’t even there for 15 minutes when I saw them pushing my daughter in on a stretcher because he had stabbed her… Her stab wounds were also strategic, on places where he previously said he didn’t stab the boyfriend because it would cause someone’s death…”
Her daughter passed away at the hospital from her wounds. Liezel still questions why the police did not act after the first stabbing incident to protect her daughter and prevent her death.
“They could’ve done way better because if they had arrested him in the first place, she would have still been able to be with her child today.”