I don't see how this device does anything to stop rape. Once the penetration has happened, the woman is being raped.
Once men in that region figure out that women may have this inside of her, all they have to do is start carrying a dildo-style weapon to get it out of the women first. All the publicity about this thing makes it that much easier for those men to be informed before they carry out the rape.
The point is, rape isn't about sex. It's about control and who has it. I think a woman is fooling herself if she thinks this is enough to tip the balance of control.
The real problem in South Africa is that it's very, very hard to prove rape in the courts. The population is riddled with myths or ignorance, including:
1. Having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. This has lead to an increase in infant rape and child rape, one of the highest in the world.
2. A study by the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme found that a quarter of secondary school students said that forced sexual intercourse did not necessarily constitute rape.
3. The country's human rights commission found that some boys committed what they called "corrective rape" on lesbians, justifying the assault by claiming that it would make the victims heterosexual.
4. In 2001, in a report by South Africa's Police Service, children were the victims of 41 percent of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in the country. Over 15 percent of all reported rapes were against children under 11, and another 26 percent against children 12-17.
5. South African law uses a narrow definition of rape (penetration into the vagina only), and court procedure often requires the woman to prove that she did not provoke the rape. This usually means the defense team will go through the woman's sexual history in order to establish that she may have consented. In short, this means the victim is on trial, not the rapist.
6. The South African government seems to advocate the view that if you are a victim of rape, you fight back. The Rapex sheath seems to play into that notion. What is wrong about that notion? Well, not everyone *can* fight back. Some people go into a paralyzed kind of shock. Others are simply too scared. Does that mean they consented? Absolutely not. But in South Africa, that's extremely hard to prove in court.
In short, the rape crisis in South Africa is endemic. Unless the South African government under Mbeki, who has an extremely poor history of understanding HIV/AIDS let alone giving his people what they need to fight it, starts targeting the population for sex education, none of this will stop. It's so easy to claim that these rapists know what they're doing is wrong. What if they don't? What if they've been taught that it's okay to do this to a woman, that it's okay to "cure" a lesbian, it's okay to have sex with a child to get cured of AIDS?
I don't think this condom/sheath thing will stop anything either, but it may some women a fighting chance to get away, in certain circumstances. However, unless we're ready to fit this kind of thing to an infant, or a young girl, we still aren't coming close to protecting the majority of rape victims in that country.
