Putting teeth in the fight against rape

ensho

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Tue Apr-13-10 11:12 AM
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Putting teeth in the fight against rape

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/100326/south-africa-rape-axe

Sonnet Ehlers looked into the eyes of the rape victim and saw nothing.

“Her eyes looked like marbles, totally dead,” said Ehlers, who was working as a medical researcher at Kimberley Hospital in the Northern Cape of South Africa when a 20-year-old South African woman was being treated for rape injuries.

But Ehlers remembers clearly one sentence the young woman uttered: “If only I had teeth down there.”

South African Ehlers made a promise to herself to "do something about this.” Forty years later, the result is the Rape-aXe, an anti-rape device with "teeth."

Rape-aXe is a flexible polyurethane condom-like tube that fits into the woman's body. Rows of jagged plastic hooks line the inside of the tube — bent backward like teeth in a shark’s mouth — and lodge in a perpetrator's penis upon entry. The perpetrator can withdraw from the woman, but the Rape-aXe remains clamped on. Trying to pull it off will cause discomfort.

Though the device causes great distress, it does not draw blood, Ehlers says, which is crucial in areas where HIV/AIDS rates are high. A man must seek medical attention to have the Rape-aXe removed. Until then, he cannot urinate, essentially tagging him until he gets to a hospital, she explains. Ehlers says she consulted an engineer, gynecologist and psychologist on the design.

Grace Faraja, 29, has lived through the constant fear of being raped. She lived most of her life in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before being granted refugee status and moving to New Hampshire in 2008. She says that if she were back in Congo, she would wear the Rape-aXe.

-snip with video and text-

Women already have been arming themselves with homemade defenses — a razor blade hidden in a vaginal sponge or razor blades glued to the inside of a plastic cap that is worn in the vagina. Some South African women have taken to wearing bicycle shorts so short and so tight that cannot be yanked off, Ehlers says.

In South Africa, which has been dubbed the rape capital of the world, women are begging for access to the device, Ehlers says. A 2006 Interpol study found that a woman is raped every 17 seconds in South Africa. A separate study found that of more than 20,000 reports of rape across South Africa, only 8 percent led to a conviction, according to a 2009 Amnesty International report.

-snip-

Ehlers will not release the Rape-aXe until she is able to first distribute the devices to South African women. She plans to distribute 30,000 at no cost, and hopefully before the World Cup games in June, she says. They will cost less than $2 each thereafter.

"Women try to fight, to save themselves, but you can’t fight men," Faraja says. "You don’t know when they’re going to rape you, you can’t walk with a weapon. It comes abruptly ... It’s done in darkness."
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its so much fun being a female

hugs and kisses for Ehlers - hope this device gets to women everywhere