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30 Hastings Women's L.J. 167 (2019)
Corrective Rape: An Extreme Manifestation of Discrimination and the State's Complicity in Sexual Violence

handle is hein.journals/haswo30 and id is 168 raw text is: 












       Corrective Rape: An Extreme Manifestation of
          Discrimination and the State's Complicity in
                                               Sexual Violence

                                               Sarah Doan-Minh*

                        I. INTRODUCTION
    On April 28, 2008, the bloody, lifeless body of a woman was found
naked and face down in a drainage ditch near Johannesburg, South Africa.'
She had been gang raped, savagely beaten, and stabbed twenty-five times
all over her body.2 Her name was Eudy Simelane, and she was a famous
player on South Africa's national soccer team, an activist for equal rights,
and one of the first openly lesbian women in the region.3 The term
corrective rape was coined following this attack.
    Corrective rape originally referred to rape perpetrated by straight men
against lesbians in order to correct or cure their homosexuality.4 It is a
punishment for being gay and for violating traditional gender presentation.5
This motive is usually made clear through verbal abuse during the rape,
which focuses on teaching a lesson to the victim and doing a favor by
showing her how to be a real woman. '6 The term is now used more
broadly to refer to the rape of any member of a group that does not conform
to gender or sexual orientation norms where the motive of the perpetrator is
to correct the individual.7
    The brutal rape and murder of Eudy Simelane brought attention to
corrective rape in other areas of the world. While corrective rape is a


  *   J.D. 2019, University of California, Hastings College of the Law; Executive Editor,
Hastings Women's Law Journal.
   1. Alexa Mieses, Gender Inequality and Corrective Rape of Women Who Have Sex with
Women, GMHC TREATMENT ISSUES, Dec. 2009, at 1, 1.
  2. Id.
  3. Id.
  4. Roderick Brown, Corrective Rape in South Africa: A Continuing Plight Despite an
International Human Rights Response, 18 ANN. SURVEY OF INT'L. & COMP. L. 45, 45-46
(2012).
  5. Mieses, supra note 1, at 2.
  6. Id.
  7. Brown, supra note 4, at 46.


HASTINGS WOMEN'S LAW JOURNAL


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