Preventing Sexual Violence in an Informal Settlement

In 2012 the Viva Foundation added Sexual Violence Prevention & Response to it's palette of services. We designed a Rape Response Protocol poster and booklet, showing what happens incident to guilty verdict. This was to assist survivors of rape, to understand what to do initially, what happens in the investigation and legal process and how to ensure a guilty verdict. However, we felt that too many programmes involve responding after the fact. We wanted to prevent rape from happening in the first place. When we received a Grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, we set out to put a prevention system in place. We deployed 200 panic buttons to households in the Alaska Informal Settlement and trained a group of community-based responders. We called our new project SAPRI - South African People's Response Initiative. We had to write the training manuals ourselves, as a set of useful training modules in lay-terms, was not available. We wrote the following courses: 1. Rape Response [From Incident to Guilty Verdict] 2. Counselling a Rape Victim 3. Court Procedures 4. Rape Specific First Aid 5. The rights of a Victim 6. The SAPRI System We launched a trial in January 2015 and over the next 36 months, we only had 5 cases of domestic violence in our community and 1 case of attempted rape and one rape [neither at one of our beneficiary homes]. We found the button also served the neighbouring households, as the shack homes are very close to each other and neighbours can hear what is happening around them and deploy the buttons on behalf of people who don't have a button. This result greatly exceeded our expectation and we hope to be able to introduce this model to other communities and institutions where people are at risk of rape and domestic violence, such as hostels and university campuses.