If the South African government is serious about its pledge to educational equality, the national and provincial education departments must coordinate to take immediate steps to address the violence girls face in school by fulfilling its responsibility to prohibit and protect girls against such abuses. Going forward, schools need to find ways to heal, rehabilitate, and build a culture of respect for girls and to address the trauma created by the violent crime experienced by so many children. The government is already taking some important steps to achieve this vision, in the face of great challenges created by the legacy of apartheid and the resource limitations of the present. Human Rights Watch hopes that this report will assist in further strengthening those efforts. We also hope that this analysis of the problem of sexual violence in South African schools and the government response to that violence can inform debates on similar issues elsewhere in the world.
Girls everywhere face gender-based violence in schools that impedes equal access to education.
Stronger efforts to address such violence are essential to achieving the aim, stated by the World Education Forum in the 2000 Dakar Framework for Action, of gender equality in education by 2015 with full and equal access to and achievement in education for girls.