Lt-Col James Chauke steps up onto the podium to make his speech to an anticipating crowd of gender-based violence (GBV) activists and businesspeople gathered at the JSE in Sandton, Johannesburg.
He first apologises for being late. He has just returned from a crime scene he and his team had been attending to since 4am.
“We had a serial rapist in Alaxandra, [that’s] the case that I am from. I don’t know if it’s a good thing but the community burned the suspect. That guy had 30 house robberies and rape cases. He went into the houses, two o’clock at night, then he would rape the women in front of the children and husbands. So before we got to him, the community got to him,” he said.
As head of the family violence, child protection and sexual offenses unit in Johannesburg North, Chauke and his 14-member team of investigators are at the coalface of the daily grim of violence against women and children.
His address to the anti-GBV organisation Tears Foundation on Thursday shed light into the chilling depth and increasingly sadistic nature of violence against women and children in the country.
“Part of what I was doing last week is occult crimes. During this time, from around September, they are rising. I’ve attended [cases of] two boys who have been mutilated for those crimes. It’s going up and up.
“Kids are being stolen and mutilated… But if you ask me or come to my office, I will show you photos because I attend postmortems.
“It is happening in SA, where you are staying. In your backyards. This one that I am talking about happened in Midstream [Estate]. Everyone knows where Midstream is. The child was mutilated in Midstream, cut open, her intestines taken out and taken to an inyanga (traditional healer) in Mamelodi because someone believes that he’s gonna be rich if he does a ritual with that (body part).”
Expressing exasperation by police who attend to these cases, Chauke says it seems the more they arrest and convict, the more brazen the criminals become.
“I think they are on to us. They are telling us, ‘you are doing nothing’. It’s very sad. We see crime scenes on a daily basis that make us wanna leave [the profession] but I’m telling myself that if I leave, then who will take over. Who will fight these criminals.
“The job that we are doing is very difficult. It’s very sad because it involves a lot of emotions. It’s not like investigating your shopliftings, your frauds, your thefts, your housebreakings. It’s cases that each time when you get out from the crime scene, like the crime scene I was in, you feel like going home; you feel like I don’t know, running away... I have seen a lot of pain, but it seems as if it escalated on a daily basis.”
Drawing a picture of the savage nature of the violence, Chauke says many rapes they deal with “are not really rapes. They are what you call an initiation into a cult. I don’t want to be graphic. I don’t want everyone to leave here traumatised”.
“What I am saying is are we pouring into a leaking bucket? Are we doing anything? Will we be at a stage where people will stand up and applaud us to say, ‘SAPS, you’ve done good this year’. Are we gonna get there, because as I’m telling you, the scenes that I see on a daily basis… [It will not happen] anytime soon.
“Things that are being reported in our offices on a daily basis [are sad]. The rapes by parents. You might think it’s stepfathers [who are committing these crimes]. No, your biological fathers [are the ones raping kids]. And you might think nyaope boys, people who are on drugs [are raping children and woman]. No, your professionals… It is happening in Sandton.
“I’ve got cases that will make your hair rise in Sandton. The president said that we are on the second pandemic with this gender-based violence, but are we? What are we doing that we did during the (Covid-19) pandemic that [shows] that we are taking this as a pandemic?”
Chauke questions the mental state of perpetrators of acts such as mutilation for muti purposes.
He tells of how he was interviewing a 27-year-old in prison who is part of a cult.
“When he talks to you, as they teach us that these people (criminals) will try get into your head, he’s trying to tell you that it is enjoyable. He will illustrate how to cut a person open and it’s nicer when he’s alive and you hear him gasping for air. He will start by screaming and later, he will gasp for air. He is not running away from telling you what happened. He’s looking you in the eye as if to say come in and try it out.”
Chauke says police also need help from civil society and for professionals to do research to assist them in understanding the kind o criminals police are dealing with.
“What type of human beings are these? What causes them to do this because it’s not a mistake. It is clear that they are enjoying what they are doing. We need civil society to get more involved. We cannot sit on the sidelines. We need to get more involved in policing work. Policing is not about the constable or the captain who arrest and take (perpetrators) to jail,” Chauke says.
He says harsh sentences meted out by the courts on cases of GBV are not a deterrent.
“It’s not working. We must come up with another plan. Yes, we’ll convict them but it keeps on popping up. It shows that we are not discouraging them. We need to come up with a way to talk to society to see what is the root cause of these people doing what they are doing.
“What is it that cause an adult as old as 45 or 50 to rape a toddler. Can we stop it somewhere. Really we cannot just go [the] policing way. We must think out of the box,” Chauke said.
sibiyan@sowetan.co.za
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