Negern – sån är han!

Gang rape: Is it a race issue?

A high proportion of such attacks appears to be carried out by young black men, according to Metropolitan Police statistics. Sorious Samura investigates this horrendous crime – and what it says about Britain today

In 1999 I witnessed a gang rape in Sierra Leone. I was forced to watch a group of rebel soldiers taking it in turns to rape a young girl in front of an audience of jeering men. It was the height of the civil conflict and rape had become a devastating weapon of war. When I moved to Britain I believed I had escaped such horrific sexual violence. As my Dispatches investigation tomorrow night shows, I was mistaken. Gang rape is happening here – and what I have found most disturbing as an African is that a disproportionate number of these attacks are being carried out by black or mixed-race young men

Gang rape is too prevalent in the Caribbean community

Darcus Howe

Published 25 June 2001

Three Christmases ago, I got myself in quite a stew in a sharp confrontation with the black leaders of anti-racism, who were backed by the entire editorial team of the recently launched black weekly the New Nation. I was on my way to South Africa to do some travel-writing when a call came from Channel 4. They were handling a rather hot potato, they said. Channel 4 had commissioned a report detailing incidents of gang rape, committed by young black men in Brixton and surrounding areas, which bordered on the barbaric. One young woman had spent more than a couple of hours with her back raked against a concrete step while up to a dozen schoolboys screwed her.

Channel 4, aware of the ambulance-chasers in the anti-racist brigade, felt they could not broadcast this huge truth without some counterbalance. They wanted me to chair a studio discussion, to go out immediately after the report, in which the issues would be aired.

I cancelled my trip to South Africa. I knew the terrain well. Gang rape was part of the urban culture in which I grew up. I entered my teens in a working-class ghetto in Port of Spain, peopled by gangs based on the Diggers and Stompers of America. I was a Style-Cramper and a Law-Breaker. Other gangs were Spike Jones and the Fallen Angels, the Apple Jackers and Sun Valley. We fought each other over teenage loves and territory. Gang rape initiated male virgins into sex. And if you didn't share, the others would take your girlfriend away.

NIGER: Rape and beatings of women seen as “normal”

Rights activists say violence against women in Niger is rampant and remains taboo
NIAMEY, 6 December 2007 (IRIN) - The news that 70 percent of women in parts of Niger find it normal that their husbands, fathers and brothers regularly beat, rape and humiliate them came as no surprise to human rights experts in Niger.

“Women here have been indoctrinated by their families, by religious officials, by society that this is a normal phenomenon,” said Lisette Quesnel, a gender-based violence advisor with Oxfam in Niger, which produced the statistic from a survey of women in the remote Zinder region of eastern Niger in 2006.

The frequency of the crimes and the impunity granted to the attackers partly explain the broad social acceptance of it, activists say. Rape is increasingly common in the capital Niamey.

Beatings and mental and physical abuse are “frequently” part of life in a typical Nigerien polygamous family, said Fatima Ibrahima, who designs projects meant to prevent this kind of violence in Niger.

And women are often made destitute overnight when their polygamous husbands throw them out on the street. Divorces are passed by judges without even hearing “one word” from the women involved.

Taboo

The full extent of the abuse goes unrecorded because no national statistics on the incidence of violence against women have ever been drawn up by the police or the medical services.