SA violent crime 'far too high'

2005-02-07 23:51

Elsabé Brits

Gordon's Bay - During the duration of a three-day conference at this seaside resort, 74 people in South Africa will be murdered.

So says Martin Schönteich, senior legal official at the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York, who spoke on Monday at the opening of a national conference on crime and justice.

The conference is being presented by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

Ten years after South Africa became a democracy, the country still has an annual murder figure of 42.7 per 100 000 people, according to this organisation's reading of official statistics.

This figure dropped from a high of 67.9 in 1995/'96.

Schönteich said: "Why it dropped, we don't know. The ideal is to have this figure at 20 per 100 000 by 2014.

"Then we'll be comparable to countries in the former eastern bloc and South America."

Has no explanation

The Western Cape's murder figure rose sharply compared to the rest of the country and also started dropping last year. There's also no explanation for this.

Anton du Plessis, chief of the crime and justice programme at the Institute for Safety Studies, said 33% of all crimes in the country were violent ones.

Sexual and domestic violent crimes were still inadequately reported, so statistics did not reflect in any way what was really taking place.

"If we see a rise in the rape statistics, it means the services offered have improved.

"There's a drop in rape stats and this worries me, not because this crime has decreased, but because it means it's not reported as frequently," he said.

- Die Burger