Johannesburg — When eight younger fashions headed off on a movie shoot on the morning of July 28, they have been excited. The coronavirus pandemic had saved them out of labor for a very long time, they usually’d been chosen to carry out in a music video.
The pay was minimal — they have been nearly doing it free of charge — but it surely wasn’t the cash that thrilled them, it was the alternative. Maybe this might be the probability they’d been ready for, when their careers would lastly take off.
But there have been no fortunate breaks. Instead, it might change into the worst day of their lives.
South Africa is a rustic at warfare with its girls. It has certainly one of the highest charges of sexual violence in the world, and on that day in July, eight extra names have been added to its lengthy record of survivors.
I met 4 of the younger girls who bravely shared their harrowing story. They have been accompanied by their moms, who fought again tears as they listened to their daughters recount the horrific ordeal. CBS News has modified their names at their request to guard their identities.
The 22-person movie crew was capturing at an deserted mine dump in Krugersdorp, close to Johannesburg. As they have been wrapping up the last scene — a gang of armed males stormed onto the set and compelled everybody to lie on the floor, defined sisters Bontle and Amanda. The sisters typically completed one another’s sentences, when one turned too distressed to talk.
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“Some of us tried to run,” Bontle, 19, mentioned. “But you know, we weren’t able to, because they were shooting.”
“And there were men spreading all over,” interrupted her elder sister Amanda. “They were expanding, maybe 15 or more of them.”
The girls have been encircled by the attackers, who wore balaclavas and compelled them to lie face down in a deep pit. The male members of the crew have been stripped bare and held captive in a separate space.
First everybody was robbed of their telephones and money. Then got here the rapes. The girls instructed CBS News the attackers took turns with all eight of the girls, who have been tortured and brutalized for greater than three hours earlier than their captors fled.
“We were crying, you know, some of the girls. They were also screaming while they were raping them,” mentioned Bontle.
“And in front of our eyes,” continued Amanda, “the other one, they raped her in front of us.”
The males threatened to shoot the girls in the event that they refused to cooperate.
“Telling me that he will kill me and all those things if I don’t listen to him,” recounted Amanda. “And then I’m like, let me do as he says, because I don’t have a choice. And then he took me to somewhere, like… next to the hole.”
She broke down sobbing at that level, unable to proceed, her eyes vast with horror and battling to get the phrases out as she remembered how they tried to bury her alive.
Her sister Bontle was dragged to a different space and raped twice. When a 3rd man approached her, she thought she was going to die.
“I saw that he was he was actually going to rape me. And then I told him: ‘I’m bleeding, I can’t.’ I faked that I’m having a miscarriage.”
They led her again to the pit and left her alone after that.
As the girls have been attacked, their buddy Zintle managed to climb right into a tree and conceal for about an hour. When she might not hear something, she jumped down — solely to be grabbed by certainly one of the males and raped.
Then there was Anita, 26, the chief of the group and the one who’d recruited her mates for the video shoot. She lives now with horrible guilt, blaming herself for what occurred. She pleaded with the males to take her as an alternative of her mates.
“I was just begging them to not touch any of the ladies,” she mentioned. “If it has to be me, then let it be me.”
But no one was spared and he or she, too, was gang raped a number of instances.
For Anita, it reopened outdated wounds. She instructed CBS News she was raped when she was a young person. And now this.
“But now, with it happening again, it’s like, why am I even in this world? Am I made or put in this world to be a rape victim? And every time I would try to make something good, it just has to come again and start…” She could not go on. Her wrenching sobs stuffed the room.
When their attackers lastly fled the scene, the battered and damaged girls went straight to the police station to report the crimes. Then they have been violated a second time: Their names and deal with have been leaked on social media. Anita was devastated.
“I just thought, why didn’t I just die? Because I mean, what’s the use? You’re killing me again. Now, you’ve already killed me and taken, and taken like, my innocence, my purity. And now you just want to kill me physically, where I can’t even go outside and just take a breather without people in my neighborhood seeing me, seeing my frustration, seeing that I’m not OK.”
August is historically the month when this nation commemorates South African girls’s heroic struggle towards apartheid. But of late, there hasn’t been a lot to rejoice. It’s become a month of mourning. A girl is raped practically each 12 minutes in the nation — and people are solely the ones that are reported to authorities.
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But this newest gang rape has tipped a rustic worn down by gender violence over the edge. It has sparked outrage and protests towards what many see as ineffective, even blundering policing.
It has been alleged that the suspects in the assault didn’t converse a South African language. Police have rounded up greater than 120 males, all of whom are in the nation illegally. None have been charged with rape. Authorities declare they’ll check their DNA to see if there is a match with proof collected from the victims.
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Lisa Vetton, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation mission, believes the prison justice system is failing girls.
“You can actually see in the last decade how the number of rapes that are being put down for conviction, that are resulting in prosecution, has declined,” she instructed CBS News. “If you are looking at that — and that’s going hand-in-hand with the worsening treatment by the police of you — there is no incentive to report either. … Why put yourself through this when there’s no guarantee that you’re ever even going to see justice?”
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Since the assault, the younger girls CBS News spoke to have lived in worry. Anita mentioned she wakes up each evening feeling like “someone was grabbing my arm, and I felt the scent of one of the guys that was raping me.”
They say they soar each time they hear gunshots, and fear that now their names are recognized, their attackers will search retaliation.
“We just don’t know what to do anymore, because we scared of our lives — not only our life, but our families’ lives, because we all not safe now,” mentioned Bontle.
For them, like hundreds of ladies in South Africa, lengthy after the bodily harm has healed, the emotional scars stay.
