You’ll often hear scary statistics about South Africa’s crime rate and it is sometimes difficult to work out which of them are true and which aren’t. This is made more difficult by the fact that finding stats on crimes that are collected in SA or by government departments is quite hard.
Having accurate statistics on the types and frequency of crime is important for the empowerement of victims for several reasons. To have an accurate and clear understanding of the scale of the problem is helpful because it allows individuals to mobilise around the issue, and it allows government to calculate how much budget they need to allocate to preventing crime. For example, you’ll see many comments online that South Africa is the ‘Rape Capital of the World’ but what does this actually mean? If we don’t have an idea of how many rapes are reported, we can only estimate how much budget is needed for
- Training police members, medical staff and prosecutors in providing compassionate support to survivors when they report
-
Image Courtesy of Hazel Thompson www.hazelthompson.com
The provision of adequate facilities to implement existing legislation and policy to ensure that survivors move smoothly through the criminal justice system
- Post-exposure prophylaxis to prevent the transmission of HIV as well as other medical requirements including STD medication, the Morning After Pill, Termination of Pregnancy etc
- The costs of court cases, court staff and the court process
- The list goes on.
If you don’t know what the problem is, you won’t know how much money and effort you need to fix it and to empower the victims and survivors of crime. This is just one example of why crime statistics are essential. This is also why it is important for you to report crime against you to the police, however small you think the incident may have been.
The Institute for Security studies has released a publication of statistics compiled by the South African Police Services where they provide crime totals for each year from 2003 to 2009. You can access that publication here.
The stats show that some types of crime are increasing (or reporting of the crimes are increasing), whilst others are decreasing.
For example in 2003/2004 there were 66079 reports of ‘sexual crimes’. In 2008/2009 this number was 70514. It’s important to note that before 2007 we had different legislation so the types of crimes reported may vary. Nevertheless there has been an increase in the number reported.
In 2003/2004 there were 95551 cases of “common robbery” and this figure decreased to 59232 in the 2008/2009 period. And in the category “all theft not mentioned elsewhere” there were 606460 cases in 2003/2004 and 394124 cases in 2008/2009.
Despite decreases there is still a significant crime problem. If you don’t report your crime the statistics will reflect improvement where there hasn’t been any, and if you don’t report your crime there won’t be enough budget to solve the problem.
Do you report crime against you? Vote in the poll below and let us know in your comments why you do or don’t.
Pingback: Most Read Post This Year – SA Crime Stats – South Africa Remains a Violent Country «
Pingback: where I called home………. « Africa's Blog
Interesting post here. As I live here on the other side of the pond, I’m quite unaware of the issues plaguing S.A. Except for the “rape capitol of the world” bit, sounds like S.A. is much like every other place else in the world…all screwed up.