Girl raped, set on fire

 INCONSOLABLE: The grandmother of a nine-year-old left to die after a particularly vicious rape in Delft, near Cape Town

A nine-year-old girl is fighting for her life after being raped and set alight on the Cape Flats.
The Grade 3 pupil was tied up, raped, strangled, burned and then left to die in undergrowth in Delft. She is now in an intensive care unit at the Red Cross Children's Hospital.
A 27-year-old man will appear in the Bellville Magistrate's Court today on charges of rape and attempted murder.


The girl's grandmother wept yesterday as she told how she untied her grandchild, who was found lying on rocks on Sunday afternoon.
"I thought she was dead but she asked for water when she saw me," said the granny.
"She was badly burned but she could speak. She told me that she had begged the man not to kill her but he strangled her, drenched her with fuel and set her alight.
"She said he laughed as she burned."

The girl, whose parents are not married and whose mother is ill, disappeared on the way to her father's house on Saturday night. A search ensued.
A neighbour told the grandmother the following day that a child had been found in a nearby field.
"She lay there helplessly," said the woman. "The top she had been wearing was terribly burned."
The community apprehended a man who had bloodstains on his trousers and was wearing a burnt T-shirt.

The grandmother survives on a state grant and can barely afford to pay the taxi fare to visit the child in hospital or to attend court.
Joan van Niekerk, the national coordinator of Childline SA, described the increasing incidence of child rape as a "war on our children. It is totally out of hand".

Earlier this month a 37-year-old father appeared in the Pietermaritzburg Magistrate's Court charged with raping his 17-year-old daughter.

Late last year, a Northern Cape man was arrested for the rape of his six-week-old niece.
And it is a year since Anene Booysen, 17, died after being raped and disembowelled in Bredasdorp, Western Cape.

Van Niekerk said politicians had made "some really bad decisions" about the prevention of, and response to, sexual offences.

"The 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children costs a fortune but there is no evidence that it produces the results we would like to see, which is awareness, and a change of attitude, that results in the protection of children and women."