A police captain has been fired for turning away a woman who wanted to lodge a complaint against a cop she accused of rape.
|||Cape Town - Police have fired a captain for turning away a woman who had wanted to lodge a complaint against a Mossel Bay policeman she accused of raping her.
The woman said she had been raped by a reservist inside the trauma room of KwaNonqaba’s satellite station at Herbertsdale on February 15 when she went to lodge a complaint of domestic violence.
The captain is the second officer to be sacked in the case.
Earlier, a 52-year-old police reservist alleged to have raped the woman was fired after an internal disciplinary hearing, and is facing a criminal charge of rape, said Moses Dlamini, spokesman for the Independent Police Investigative Directorate.
The woman said when she reported the rape at the same station the following day, the captain “dismissed her claims as not serious and failed to institute criminal proceedings against the suspect”, said police spokesman Andrè Traut.
After instituting disciplinary proceedings against the captain in February, provincial commissioner General Arno Lamoer on Monday confirmed the findings of a disciplinary panel to dismiss him.
Asked to name the captain, Traut refused, saying the dismissal was an internal matter which the captain could appeal against.
Sharon Messina, from NGO Women on Farms Project, said women routinely faced difficulties in reporting domestic violence to police. “Women say that when they go to the police station to report domestic abuse the police say that if nothing has happened, they can’t do anything,” said Messina.
She said women often feared being targeted for simply reporting cases to the police.
jan.cronje@inl.co.za
Cape Times