India’s sobering New Year’s eve
On December 16th a 23-year old student was gang raped by six men in New Delhi. She died from her injuries in a hospital in Singapore on December 29th. All six men have been arrested and charged with murder. The name of the victim has not been released yet. With this sad story India has reached a tipping point. The outcry over this horrible attack has not ebbed after a day or two but rather intensified. Men and women are protesting with an intensity India has not seen before when it came to cases of rape. Many New Year’s eve festivities have been cancelled as the country is mourning the...
Read MoreUbuntu Now and South Africa Project team up with TVEP
In November of 2008, Ubuntu Now announced a partnership with Sonke Gender Justice– a South African organization that promotes social awareness of gender issues relating to the local HIV/AIDS epidemic. Today, we are pleased to introduce a new member of the Ubuntu Now / South Africa Project network: the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Program [TVEP]. Like Sonke Gender Justice, TVEP focuses on raising awareness for social issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Whereas Sonke Gender Justice’s ‘One Man Can‘ initiative places its attention on male education and Rape...
Read MoreStop “Corrective Rape” in South Africa
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr It is with disgust and incredulity that I read daily about the heinous crime of “corrective rape” that is still taking place on the streets of South Africa, especially in the “African Townships” (basically poorer suburbs inhabited by Africans, such as Soweto, Gugulethu, Langa, Kayalitsha etc.) Corrective rape is “the rape of a lesbian by a man either to punish her or cure and correct her sexual orientation”. Despite South Africa having a very liberal constitution, which forbids discrimination against LGBTs ( Lesbians,...
Read MoreOur Value Statement as a Tag Cloud
I’ll be the first to admit that if you haven’t seen one before a “tag cloud” can be a bit confusing, but the concept is actually pretty cool: statistically analyze all the words in a book, on a Web site, or similar, then pick the dozen most common important words (e.g., skip “the” and “and”) and display them, with the words that appear more frequently larger than those that are more uncommon. You’ve probably seen them as you’ve surfed the Web, perhaps without really thinking about how quickly and efficiently they can convey a lot...
Read MoreSome recent stats on rape from South Africa
A recent study on rape by the South Africa Medical Research Council came as a strong reminder on the severity of the rape situation in South Africa. According to the study 1 in 4 men have already forced a women to have sex with him. Rape is generally accepted in wide parts of the society. The police statistics show 86 women and 64 minor girls being raped each day. 30% of adolescents stated that their first sexual encounter was based on rape. The reported number of rapes per year is 55,000. The University of South Africa estimates that the real number is around 1 million. If this number is...
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