I get the newsletter for my neighbourhood in Joburg. I was reading it for the this month and in amongst the bulletin points about litter in the streets and noise there was a bare sentence that stood out to me “the reports of the rape cannot be verified, therefore it probably didn’t happen”. The way it was dealt with within the rest of the administrative bumph made me so angry – and especially the flippancy of “it probably didn’t happen” giving no indication to what measures were taken to try and figure out what happened. The message sent to any woman reading that newsletter is: if you were raped no one will care, no one will believe you and no effort will be made to follow up.
