Updates to assault form is better for rape survivors
State Advocate Pule Mathaha, who took part in recent training on the form organised by the Foundation for Human Rights, said the changes will make the form easier to prosecute attackers
“I am glad that they have taken away the words sexual assault and now use sexual offence and assault or rape, which are specific offences,” said Mathaha, who is based at the Tembisa Magistrates’ Court.
Mathaha added that the new form is easier to understand, and provides space for the facts of the incident which the old form did not.
“Doctors now have to focus on information that is relevant to the case and a lot of information that they found to be irrelevant have been removed,” he said.
Examinations
Doctor Steve Naidoo said the changes will make the form easier to document the medical findings.
“From my perspective, there was a need to change for diagnostic purposes but for the legal people there were issues with certain things that were missing on the form,” said Naidoo. “There was no space for the amount of history that we must have written down. There was no space for the history of the incident.”
The old form also did not have enough space for circumstances of the incident, clothing examination and certain contact details.
“But from my perspective, more importantly, I felt the form prescribed medical findings that over the years were taken as gospel. For example, the number of fingers admitted on a vaginal examination does not help you to distinguish if a woman has been penetrated two days ago or not, so what the number of fingers had to do in the J88 form, we did not know.”
However, these changes might not have an impact on the number of prosecutions because, as Mathaha puts it, prosecutions depend on the doctor’s findings and the merits of the case.- Health-e News
Dial *134*334# to access a free and anonymous list of services in five languages for survivors of sexual violence, or visit our map to view and rate facilities across the country
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Updates to assault form is better for rape survivors
by Marcia Zali, Health-e News
March 28, 2019