Ghost Twerkers

Abstract

Ghost Twerkers is specially written by Ola-Kris in honour of all victims of rape, femicide, inequality, wars and gender based violence all over the world, especially on the African continent and particularly in South Africa. South African Police Service, with Stats SA, has published the country’s crime statistics for 2018. According to the SAPS, shockingly, the number of reported rapes in South Africa has increased to 40,035 cases in 2018. On the other hand, sexual offences in 2017 was 49,660 but rose to 50,108 in 2018.

The rape of South African women is among the highest in the world, according to a Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) report release. In 2015/2016, apart from horrifying rape statistics, a surprising finding was that 2.6% of white women and 2.5% of black women believed men may beat women. An unexpected finding was that women had the same pattern of attitudes towards domestic violence as men, Stats SA said. One in 40 SA women believe it is acceptable for men to beat them. At least 2.6% of white women and 2.5% of black women believed men may physically assault women. For both men and women, the highest percentage of individuals thought it was acceptable for a man to hit a woman if she argues with him, and the lowest percentage of individuals thought it was acceptable for a man to hit a woman if she burns food. Black men had the highest percentage of individuals who thought it was acceptable for a man to hit a woman, followed by white women. This development has again revealed to the world the South African rape culture. “In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm. In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable”. One of the biggest problems with an inescapable rape culture is that it directly affects survivors getting justice for the crime because not only do many victims feel as though they won’t be believed; there is a widespread belief that many victims are to blame for being raped because of wearing revealing clothes, being intoxicated or even due to their sexual orientation among others. Of course, this is all nonsense as the victim is never at fault.