S. AFRICA WOMAN KILLED BY PARTNER EVERY 6 HOURS – STUDY
By Ed Stoddard

May 24, 2005 (Reuters) - A woman is killed every six hours in South Africa by her partner and less than 40 percent of the homicides lead to a conviction, according to a new study.

The study is further evidence of the deep social scars that remain a decade after the end of apartheid, a regime that provoked a major upsurge in violence and alcoholism and stigmatized and disempowered black men, according to analysts. "A woman is killed by her intimate partner in South Africa every six hours. This is the highest rate (8.8 per 100,000 female population 14 years and older) that has ever been reported in research anywhere in the world," says the study.

The report is based on 1999 data collected by the Medical Research Council, the University of Cape Town and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

"We estimate that 1,349 women were murdered by an intimate partner nationally in 1999," says the study, which adds to South Africa's unenviable reputation for violent crime.

Just last week a South African policeman shot and killed five people including his wife and 3 of their children in what was believed to have been a jealous rage.

The study refers to the murder of a woman at the hands of her partner as "intimate femicide." It found that the perpetrators of such crimes were most likely to be blue collar, farm or security workers.

"We feel that the data is not out of date and it is the first really comprehensive study of its kind in South Africa," said MRC spokesman Julian Jacobs. Female homicides were identified from the death registers at mortuaries and then the cases were followed up with the police.

COLOURED WOMEN MOST AT RISK

It provides the rates of intimate femicide by race and finds that women of the mixed race "coloured" community are the most at risk of being killed by their partner, with 18.3 out of 100,000 dying that way in 1999.

The rates per 100,000 for other racial groups were: African, 8.9, Indian 7.5 and white 2.8.

It found that only 37.3 percent of all female homicides lead to a conviction and only 35.1 percent of "intimate femicides" resulted in one. No comparisons for convictions involving male homicides were immediately available.
Guns and alcohol were significant factors in many cases.

"The study findings confirm the role of alcohol in intimate partner violence," it says.

The report also highlights serious shortcomings in the police force with many of the cases not opened or poorly investigated with possible leads inadequately followed.

Its recommendations include special police training for female murders, the establishment of a public crime data base and the rigorous enforcement of gun control measures.

Another recent study found that South Africans are more likely to be shot than suffer any other kind of unnatural death as gun crime pushes the country's violent death rate to up to 8 times the global average.

Glaring income disparities, high unemployment, easy access to illegal firearms and alcohol abuse have all been linked by analysts to South Africa's rates of violent crime which are among the highest in the world.

Violent crime levels have been dropping but remain high.

For the year to March 2004 -- the latest year for which data is available -- the murder rate per 100,000 people fell nearly 10 percent to 42.7.

From: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L24407145.htm

Medical Research Center of South Africa Study: www.mrc.ac.za/policybriefs/woman.pdf