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South African men don’t generally have a very good reputation when it comes to the treatment of women.

Likewise, our law doesn’t do enough to protect women, especially when they are in tricky, not so black and white situations.

Take for example this rape case reported by News24.

A former paramedic named Coko and a Rhodes University Master’s student were in a romantic relationship at the time that the student reported having been raped by Coko.

Coko was arrested in September 2018 after the student laid a charge, saying that Coko had forced himself on her without her consent:

The National Prosecuting Authority had said the two had agreed that they could have oral sex, but the woman had expressly warned Coko against any penetration because she was still a virgin, News24 previously reported.

But now Coko has been acquitted, with the Eastern Cape High Court setting aside his seven-year prison sentence because they decided that the Makhanda Regional Court findings were “erroneous”.

The court papers mentioned that Coko believed that consent had been given, and would have stopped having sex if he had known that consent was being withheld.

Here is acting Judge Tembeka Ngcukaitobi on the decision to overturn Coko’s conviction:

“It was the evidence of the appellant [Coko] that throughout the encounter, the complainant was an equally active participant, she was not merely passive – she kissed the appellant back, she held him, she had no problem with the removal of her clothes, she watched him take off his clothes without raising an objection, she knew he was erect, she did not object to the oral sex.”

“The only area where there was a dispute was after the penetration. It is in this area where the complainant says she objected and said the penetration was hurting. The appellant’s evidence was that when the complainant said the penetration was hurting, he ‘would stop and then continue’.”

The grey area between explicit and implicit consent, as well as between what sex is and isn’t, seems to have interfered with the course of justice in this situation.

I mean, the complainant seems to have clearly told Coko what her boundaries were.

South Africa has been referred to as the rape capital of the world on numerous occasions, and with 10 006 cases of rape registered in South Africa between April 2021 to the end of June 2021 (a mere three month period), it seems wholly justified.

SA People reported last year that according to the latest annual crime statistics released by the South African Police Service (SAPS) there is an average of 116 rapes reported to the police each day.

That’s just the number of rape cases reported – so you can only imagine the number of unreported rapes that are happening every day.

When women don’t get the justice they deserve after bravely reporting a rape incident and when the law isn’t on their side, it makes gender-based violence in the country an even more momentous challenge to overcome.

[source:news24]