Wednesday, July 21, 2010






































Yesterday I was watching tv as I rode the bike at the gym and was instantly engaged in the program playing on ESPN - E60. It was about disturbing crimes happening in South Africa that I had never heard of called Corrective Rape. This is the flawed belief that if a straight man violently rapes a gay woman he can change her sexual orientation. I started to wonder, how is it that I have never heard of these horrific crimes before. Then I thought it must be a very rare type of crime. Sadly I was mistaken and learned that 10 new cases of "corrective rape" occur every week in Cape Town alone! While lesbians have become the target of these awful hate crimes, not one woman in general is safe from sexual assaults. The most shocking statistic is 1 in 2 women in South Africa will be raped in their lifetime. How can this be!? How!? It got me thinking of my younger sister and how if we lived in South Africa one of us would be raped at some point in our lives. I feel guilty and sad to know that we live in a world that these things happen every day and many people are not aware of them or to the extreme of their occurrences.


Now that I'd aware of these awful hate crimes I feel like it is my duty to spread the word. Please watch the following video (link below) and pass it on to as many people as you can. While one woman in Cape Town wears a jacket that reads "I'm Lesbian and Proud", many other women live in fear and have no voice.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH E60: Corrective Rape