Slight decline in rape and other sexual offences

Sexual offences declined by 4.3% overall‚ and rape by 4%‚ according to the latest crime statistics.

Addressing Parliament on Tuesday‚ SAPS' statistics expert Norman Sekhukhune cited data from a small sample of rape cases to illustrate victim and offender profiles.

A sample of 334 rape cases from the 30 main contributing stations revealed that 98.9 percent of victims were female‚ and 1.1 percent male.

Of the male victims‚ one third of the rapes recorded were male-on-male rapes.

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9.1 percent of the victims in the sample were under the age of nine.

Police were also able to indicate that the most common places where the rapes occurred were at the offender's home‚ followed by in open areas such as streets‚ parks and fields‚ and in the victim's own residence.

Among the suspects‚ 50% consumed alcohol and 11.1 percent had used drugs before committing the crimes.

Police also indicated that 24.7 percent of the victims had consumed alcohol and 6.9 percent had used drugs before the attacks.

Questioned at a media conference afterwards why this data was relevant in the case of victims‚ acting police commissioner Lesetja Mothiba said he didn't know anything about the survey being quoted.