UN Women and Thuthuzela Care Centres

Un Women
Progress of the World's Women (a UN Women website)

I really doubt anyone cares how I found them, but I did. UN Women is an UN organization that focuses on women's rights and gender equality world wide. They also record information about different issues around the world and make suggestions about how to help women. One of these suggestions was the Thuthuzela Care Centres of South Africa.

The TCCs are basically "One-Stop Shops" for rape victims. Most rape victims will never get to a trial or see a conviction due to all the obstacles and different people they have to see in order to see a trial. Many times, they'll also run into defeatists who say they are wasting their time and might even say the victims deserved it. The TCCs try and take these steps away. They're staffed with medical staff, counsellors, and legal advocates that are specifically trained to help rape victims and are all found at the same place in a hospital, so there's no bouncing around from place to place and person to person.

These places are extremely effective. I quote directly from the executive summary PDF (and not the website):

Quote :

Conviction rates for rape cases dealt with by the Soweto TCC in Gauteng Province have reached up to 89 percent, compared to a national average of 7 percent.

That, friends, is F***ING AMAZING. Regardless of where your personal "here" is, we need them here. Bug your local political representatives to all hell and get them here... Please?

This place seems good, because the victims can just get all the b.s. they need to deal with done at this one location, which is probably the longest aspect of the healing process. The time and effort it takes to do all these things is why a lot of women never complete these steps at all, and never work on a healing process or dealing with the ramifications of what happened.