20-year-old South African Zukiswa Gaca was at a bar with friends when a man tried to ask her out. "I told the guy that no I'm a lesbian so I don't date guys and then he said to me, 'no I understand. I've got friends that are lesbians, that's cool, I don't have a problem with that.'"
Gaca says he was nice and she trusted him, and they left the bar to meet up with a group of friends, but things went bad quickly. He told Zukiswa that he actually hated lesbians and threatened her, saying, "I'm going to show you that you are not a man, as you are treating yourself like a man,'" Then he raped her as his friend watched.
CNN details Zukiswa's story and describes the scope of "corrective rape" in South Africa-- a horrible phenomenon where men rape lesbians in the belief that it will turn them straight.
It was not the first time Gaca had been raped, either. She ran away from her home village, in the rural Eastern Cape, after the first rape when she was 15 years old and too afraid to press charges. Most known victims, like Gaca, are poor and black and so are the perpetrators, prompting many to ask how a people who fought against discrimination during apartheid can today treat some of its most vulnerable in such a violent manner.
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