Attitudes to lesbians have changed little in 20 years, says activist Funeka Soldaat, who has been raped, beaten and stabbed.
|||Cape Town - Funeka Soldaat has been stabbed, raped and attacked.
The reason, she says, is because she came out as a lesbian - something which was unheard of in black communities at the time.
Twenty years later, she says, the picture has not changed all that much in townships, where homosexuals are often targeted.
Speaking on Saturday at the Orange Day event (the 25th of each month is UN Orange Day) organised by the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, she said police did not treat hate crimes against lesbians with the same seriousness as other crimes.
Soldaat is the founder of Free Gender, an organisation that raises awareness about hate crimes and gender-based violence.
She told the gathering marking the launch of Orange Day, an initiative to highlight violence against women and children, that she found it problematic Africans found it “uncomfortable” to talk about homosexuality.
She told the Cape Times how she was attacked in what she believes was a so-called “corrective” rape. It was in 1995 and Soldaat was returning from a World Aids Day event in Khayelitsha when four men attacked her as she was crossing a field.
As they were raping her, she said, one of the attackers said: “We knew we would get you one day.” This led Soldaat to believe her attackers knew her.
She said she told police she had been raped because of her sexual orientation, but they had not taken it seriously and would not open a docket.
“It was really difficult for lesbians to go to the police back then because they would make fun of it,” she said. “I believe if they had taken my case seriously, I would have been able to identify my attackers.”
Department of Justice and Constitutional Development regional head Hishaam Mohamed said that in the past 13 months, 64 000 rape cases had been reported nationally. He said President Jacob Zuma and his cabinet had “declared war on gender-based violence”.
xolani.koyana@inl.co.za
Cape Times