Johannesburg: A white South African judge was at the centre of a social media storm late on Monday after Facebook comments emerged in which she suggested rape was part of black culture.
Political parties rushed to condemn the messages, which sparked fresh outrage after a series of recent internet postings underlined racial tensions in South Africa, 22 years after the end of apartheid rule.
Social activist Gillian Schutte said High Court Judge Mabel Jansen made the comments to her during an online conversation with her. Schutte reported the remarks on Facebook and Twitter, raising a storm of condemnation in social and traditional media.
“In their culture a woman is there to pleasure them. Period,” wrote Jansen, who sits in the High Court in the capital Pretoria.
“It is seen as an absolute right and a woman’s consent is not required.”
Jansen added: “I still have to meet a black girl who was not raped at about 12. I am dead serious.”
“Murder is also is not a biggy. And gang rapes of baby, daughter and mother (are) a pleasurable pastime.”
The opposition Democratic Alliance party said it would report the messages to the country’s Judicial Services Commission to be investigated.
Her comments were “not only hurtful and demeaning”, but undermined “the dignity of our people,” the party said.
The women’s league of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lambasted the judge.
“Her comments made on Facebook where she claims that the rape of young children is part of black culture, are purely racist and misrepresentation of facts about black culture,” it said.
The league questioned whether Jansen would be able to deal fairly with cases of rape in court.
Jansen told Business Day newspaper that her postings had been misrepresented.
“What I stated confidentially to somebody in a position to help has been taken completely out of context and referred to specific court cases,” she said.
“The real issue ... is the protection of vulnerable women and children and an endeavour to cure the pandemic.”
Schutte told the eNCA news channel on Monday she had previously sent the posts “to people in the legal profession to ask what could be done about the content of her utterances”.
Jansen said she had contacted Schutte via Facebook because she understood the activist could give advice on assistance to vulnerable victims.
The messages, posted a year ago, were part in a Facebook conversation that was made public on Sunday.
Anger erupted earlier this year when Penny Sparrow, a white realtor and DA member, complained on Facebook about black people littering beaches and likened them to “monkeys”.
In the ensuing uproar, local government employee Velaphi Khumalo wrote in another viral Facebook message that blacks should act towards whites “as Hitler did to the Jews”.
Official statistics showed that 43,195 rapes were reported in South Africa between April 2014 and March 2015, though most rapes are not reported to police.
Africa Check, a fact-checking project devised by but independent of the AFP Foundation, recently dismissed reports that a woman or child was raped every 26 seconds in the country.
The project said the number of rapes committed each year in South Africa could not be accurately estimated due to lack of research.
Reported cases of rape have been on the decline, according to the Institute of Security Studies think tank, with 43,195 reported in 2014-15, down 7.4 per cent from 2008/9, though analysts say the crime often goes unreported.
