Book of South African - Book of Women - Mail & Guardian

she says. “And I started thinking, this can’t be
right.”
Martin changed the protocol. By the time
she left the district surgeon’s offices in 1996
she had commandeered the matron’s flat in
the old nursing college in Hillbrow and turned
it into a facility with an interview room and a
separate, private examination area with an
en-suite bathroom. She had arranged funding
for 24-hour nursing staff and had persuaded
her fellow district surgeons to attend to the
women as soon as they presented at the clinic.
She enlisted the support of donors to
provide toiletries and clean panties for the
victims, who were now able to wash after their
examination. She collaborated with the police
to open an office where women could file
their complaints on site instead of going to the
police stations. And she created a rape forum
where magistrates, district surgeons and
police could meet to discuss individual cases.
After failing to persuade the province to
provide drugs on the premises, she facilitated
referral of the women to local clinics for
further management of sexually transmitted
diseases and post-exposure prophylaxis for
HIV. She improved the forensic collection of
evidence, trained other district surgeons in
the techniques, wrote a protocol handbook
and opened two more rape clinics, at Bara-
gwanath and in Lenasia.
She also began collecting research data,
documenting that a third of the complainants
reported more than one perpetrator and
that the younger the victim, the more likely
38 Book of South AfrICAn women 2012
the perpetrators were to be known to her. Of
the 573 patients in her initial study, four were
under the age of six and a further eight were
younger than 12.
By the time a post in forensic medicine
finally became available in 1996, Martin had
examined more than 2 000 rape survivors
and had developed a life-long interest in rape,
particularly rape homicide. As a registrar in
forensics, first at Wits and then at UCT, she
began working at the mortuary, in the world
of rubber boots, plastic aprons, drainable
floors, hoses and cold steel tables. Her case of
instruments included saws, chisels and knives.
She performed autopsies, visited crime scenes
to collect evidence and went to court as an
expert witness. She loved it.
Martin adapted the forensic evidence
kit she had developed in conjunction with
scientists at the South African Police Service
while still a district surgeon and applied it to
rape homicide cases, a move that increased
the conviction rate for this crime. Her work
on two of the dead victims and one of the
survivors of the Nasrec serial killer, Lazarus
Mazingane, contributed to his incarceration;
her mentor, Klepp, conducted the autopsies
on the remainder of his victims.
In 2004, at the age of 39, Lorna Martin was
appointed chief specialist and head of the division
of forensic pathology at UCT. She was the
first woman, and the youngest person, to hold
this post in South Africa. By that time she had
published a substantial body of research into
rape and rape homicide and she still loved
forensic pathology. Her research revealed that
for every 1 000 women raped in the Western
Cape, 12 will be killed in the attack, that more
than half of all rape victims know their perpetrator
or perpetrators and that in 19% of the
cases, the perpetrator is a husband or boyfriend.
The cause of death of women killed by
their lovers is usually blunt force. Strangers are
more likely to kill using guns and knives and
rapists tend to strangle and bite.
Martin’s pioneering work on the medicolegal
management of rape survivors has been
included in both South Africa’s national policy
and the World Health Organisation guidelines
for the management of victims of sexual violence.
Sadly, in South Africa, in spite of the
improved collection of forensic evidence, less
than 20% of rape survivors coming through
the ordinary criminal courts will see their
assailant sent to jail. In an attempt to improve
these figures Martin joined forces in 2004 with
Professor Lynette Deny, a gynaecologist, and
Associate Professor Lillian Artz, a criminologist,
to establish the gender, health and justice
research unit in the department of forensic
medicine.
“Our unit represents the intersection of
health and law,” says Artz, who leads a team
of fellow criminologists in the field of genderbased
violence. Working with the departments
of forensics, gynaecology, public
health and psychiatry, the unit has undertaken
research into sexual violence and HIV, the characteristics
of men who kill their partners, and
the reasons why so many women who experi-