By ALEX DUVAL SMITH
JOHANNESBURG - The rape in Johannesburg at the weekend of a 5-month-old girl by a 17-year-old has sent shockwaves through South Africa, prompting a deluge of calls to children's helplines and claims that sexual abuse on infants is increasing.
The baby was yesterday recovering at Johannesburg Hospital after surgeons inserted a colostomy tube in her abdominal wall.
Doctors said it was likely she would require reconstructive surgery. They would not say if she was being given anti-retroviral drugs to counter a possible HIV infection.
Police said a 17-year-old "friend of the family" had given himself up at the inner-city block of flats where the rape took place on Sunday. A second man was being questioned.
The rape is the latest in a series of attacks on infant girls, including, last month, 9-month-old "Baby Tshepang" who was sodomised by up to six men at her home in Northern Cape.
She remains at Kimberley Hospital where she is doing well.
"She will soon be transferred to the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town where she will undergo surgery to repair her sphincter," said hospital medical director Hamid Shabbir.
"Later she and the family will have to be counselled. There is evidence that even such a young child can be mentally affected by such an attack," he said.
The powerful media response to Baby Tshepang's rape has prompted police to release details of at least a further 10 reported rapes of girls under the age of 2 since the beginning of last month.
Lynne Cawood, director of Childline in Gauteng (Greater Johannesburg), said her organisation began noticing an increase in the incidence of rapes of children under 24 months about two years ago.
"The perpetrators are also getting younger and younger," she said.
Cawood said the reasons for the horrifying trend were probably to be found in South Africa's deeply patriarchal society "in which men are allowed to feel they own their wife and children", and where heavy drinking, poverty and unemployment are common.
She said South Africans had internalised violence for generations during the apartheid era that officially ended in 1994.
"It is increasingly clear that we all underestimated the profound damage caused to us by living in a civil war situation for so many years."
- INDEPENDENT
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