More than a quarter of men surveyed in a study in South Africa said
they had committed rape. Nearly half the respondents said they had raped more
than once.
Nearly 28 percent of the men surveyed by the South
African Medical Research Council said they had raped a woman or a girl,
with nearly five percent saying they had done so in the past year.
Men
also admitted to raping their partners, participating in gang-rapes,
and some raped other men or boys. Nearly ten percent said their first
experience of coercive sex was when they were ten or younger; and most
raped for the first time before age 20.
Rachel Jewkes, the
director of the Council's Gender and Health Research Unit, said the
study showed that men who rape, generally also engage in other risky
behaviors.
"They are more likely to be physically violent
towards women, they are more likely to have had multiple sexual
partners, [some] that I looked at having more than twenty sexual
partners; having transactional sex, sex with a prostitute, [and engage
in] very heavy alcohol consumption," said Jewkes.
Jewkes notes
that many men who rape had childhoods where one or both parents was
absent, where there were poor parent-child relationships, or where they
experienced physical, sexual or emotional abuse. In addition she says,
many of the men who rape grow up poor and with few prospects of
building productive lives.
"And I think one of the ways in which
we see violence towards women and violence towards other men, sort of
developing as an idea and legitimated, is within a context where men
feel they don't have avenues to express themselves as successful men in
more benign ways through having jobs, having families, homes, through
feeling good about themselves in the sort of conventional way that is
accessible to men who are in a much higher income bracket," said Jewkes.
South African society is overwhelmingly patriarchal and Jewkes says this has contributed to a skewed view of manhood.
"Well
we certainly have a dominant idea of masculinity that is really rooted
in our overall patriarchal society and that idea is based on the fact
that men are superior to women, and that men should be leading women,
men should be in control of women, and one way in which men demonstrate
the control is through the idea they should be able to get any woman
who they want to for, you know as a girlfriend or for sex," she said.
Jewkes
said they were surprised to find that men who rape are no more likely
to be HIV-positive than those who do not. However she says that
because violence is so often associated with rape, the chances of
transmitting HIV in a rape encounter are increased. Consequently she
says that treatment of rape victims should always include post-exposure
prophylaxis against HIV.
The survey of 1,738 men between the
ages of 18 and 49, from all race groups and across different
socio-economic groups, was done in three districts of South Africa's
Eastern Cape and KwaZulu/Natal provinces. The survey was conducted
using digital recording devices to ensure the anonymity of the
respondents.
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