Approximately 200,000 South African women per year report some type of violent physical attack against them to the police. More than 40% of South African men interviewed disclosed being physically violent towards a partner, and 40%–50% of women interviewed identified as victims of some type of intimate partner violence. Data compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2012 reported that approximately 60,000 women and children are victims of domestic abuse in South Africa every month, which is the highest reported rate globally. In 2009, female homicide by intimate partners in South Africa was reported at a rate of 24.7 per 100,000 people, more than six times the global average. Rates of physical and sexual gender-based violence against female sex workers (FSWs) are especially high, with a sample of FSWs in Soweto, South Africa reporting liftetime rates of gender-based violence as high as 76%. Occurrences of gender-based violence are inherently hard to account for, as many go unreported, but factors specific to South Africa make the numbers even more likely to underrepresent the scope and frequency of the violence.
In addition to the high prevalence of gender-based violence against women, South African girls also often become victims of gender-based violence. Approximately 39% of South African girls experience some form of sexual violence as minors. Startling cases of “baby rape” came into the spotlight in 2001, when 6 men gang-raped a 9-month-old girl, leading to investigation of past child rape incidents dating back to the 1990s. These crimes have continued to occur and gain publicity in South Africa, and the most recently publicized baby rape case happened in 2019. As recently as 2006, nurses in some parts of South Africa encouraged mothers to bring their daughters into local clinics to receive contraceptive injections as soon as they started menstruating, given the likelihood that they would be raped more than once as a teenager.
In 1999, 40% of victims who reported rapes to the police were under the age of 18, and 15% were girls under the age of 12. Twenty years later, not much has changed; a 2019 analysis by the South African Police Services (SAPS) showed that in 2017 and 2018, 33.3% of rape victims in the Northern cape were between 18 and 28 years old and 32.9% were between 9 and 17 years old. According to SAPS, the total 2019 reported rape rate is 90.9 per 100,000 people. However, SAPS estimated that only 1 in 36 cases are actually reported to police; by this measure, there could have been more than two million additional rapes that went unreported.