Frightening statistics

- South Africa is the rape capital of the world. According to official Interpol statistics, South Africa is the world leader in sexual abuse of females. There are an estimated 1.7 MILLION rapes a year in a country with a population of 50 million. That means one rape every three minutes.
-  Of those attacks, only a small percentage - roughly 55,000 cases a year - are reported to the police and even fewer lead to formal charges and a court case. Only a very small percentage of the court cases result in an actual conviction.
- 65%, or two out of three South African females will be raped or molested in their lives.
- According to an official government study on rape, a South African girl is more likely to be raped than she is to finish high school.
- Doctors Without Borders has estimated that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa.
- In an anonymous 2009 survey by South Africa's Medical Research Council (MRC), one in four men admitted to raping a woman; 46 percent of them said they had raped repeatedly.
- Another MRC study found that a woman is killed by her intimate partner every six hours in South Africa, the highest rate that has ever been reported in research anywhere in the world.
- Nearly three-quarters - 73 percent - of the admitted perpetrators in the anonymous 2009 MRC study on South African rape said they carried out their first assault before the age of 20.
- There are 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year in South Africa, which is by far the highest in the world: Botswana is in second place with 93, Sweden in third with 64; no other country exceeds 32.
- South African lesbians have been subjected to "corrective" rape in an attempt to change their sexual orientation.
- In the late 1990s, witch doctors in South Africa were recommending raping a baby as a cure for HIV/AIDS.
- The number one cause of death amongst pregnant woman is homicide at the hands of the father of the baby.

- South Africa has the largest number of people living with HIV in the world, an estimated 5.6 million people.
- For those South Africans ages 15 to 24 who are infected with HIV, three-quarters are women.
- Reproductive health conditions including HIV/AIDS, are the leading cause of death and illness in women worldwide between 15 and 44 years of age, and the second leading cause of death and illness when both men and women of reproductive age are taken into account.
- Worldwide, an estimated 250 million years of productive life are lost every year as a result of reproductive health problems.
- Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are a leading cause of death and disability among women of reproductive age in developing countries.
- Africa and Asia together account for 95 per cent of the world's maternal deaths.
- Research shows that one in ten pregnancies will end in an unsafe abortion, with Asia, Africa and Latin America accounting for the highest numbers.
- There are 76 million unintended pregnancies every year in the developing world. These lead to 19 million annual unsafe abortions, causing some 68,000 deaths (not including the aborted foetuses).