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An art installation hosted in Maboneng called SA's Dirty Laundry has people talking. Two South African artists based in Jozi, Jenny Nijenhuis and Nondumiso Msimanga, have created an artwork, which according to Netwerk24, sees panties pegged to a laundry line spanning 1.2 kilometres.
Msimanga says that each undergarment, which was collected over the course of 4 months, represents each rape occurring in South Africa on a daily basis. Yet her fellow artist, Nijenhuis, says they represent the prevalence of rape and sexual offense. Nijenhuis also told Netwerk24 that the 3600 is an estimate.
Kate Wilkinson of AfricaCheck.org, however, claims that the artists have miscalculated the stats and that the methodology they used to get to that number was flawed.
In this article she explains why the 3600 number is wrong. When you calculate the number of rapes reported to the police it works out to 3298 rapes per day. But this is when using regional stats which can't be applied to the rest of the country.
Talk about shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
The main issue here, that really shouldn't be debatable, is that these numbers are staggering. Does it matter that the artists' symbolic depiction of sexual violence doesn't depict the exact number of sexual offences per day?
And can it ever be correct, since we know how many rapes and incidences of sexual violence go unreported?
There are a plethora of reasons why so many women, men and children don't report their rapes. And we need to address these vigorously.
Rape statistics will always be inconsistent because victims are shamed and blamed and threatened with more violence. Which is why projects like SA's Dirty Laundry, which address the underexposed gravity SA's sexual assault issue is so important.
For more on this project, watch the video below:
