Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group

Monday, October 21, 2002

THE CRIME PROBLEM IN SOUTH AFRICA

MR. MORRIS: South Africa, just for your information, is about twice the size of Texas. It has a population of about 42 million people, and, unfortunately, we've got a very high crime incidence. The laboratory is composed of four laboratories at which we do DNA in two of those laboratories. We initiated our DNA work in 1991. We discontinued the serological typing work in 1996 and recently looked at the information on our DNA database, which is in its infancy at the moment.

Crime investigation, to give you some idea of these figures, these figures are quoted for last year incidents through 100,000 of the population. So sexual assault, 119; murder, 44; assault with intention to do grievous bodily harm, 557; burglary, 659; and theft of all types, 1,259 incidents per 100,000 of the population.

Case load in terms of DNA, this is what our case load has looked like over the cases which we have received, peaking at over 40,000 last year, the problem being being able to do DNA on all of those cases, how to get all of these cases through, and, as is the tendency in the world, an increasing load which needs to be dealt with to assist in the investigation of these crimes.

These are the distribution of cases which we are receiving at the laboratory. As you can see, rape, sexual assault forms the greater proportion of these cases. What our concern is if one moves over then to doing a database, this would then decrease to a figure of about 3% of the total cases that we receive, and by looking at that representing a total figure of 40,000 cases would obviously have a very negative impact on the backlogs which we will experience.

One of the biggest problems that we have in South Africa is rapes of minors. It is a serious problem. One of our main objectives that we're trying to address in South Africa are crimes against women and children, how to reduce those, to give them the necessary investigation and scientific support in those investigations, and how to try and solve this problem.

There was an instance. I know that it was published internationally. It was the rape of a baby with the name of Tshepang. She was nine months old and was apparently from the initial investigation raped by six individuals. These people were arrested. We received their DNA profiles as well as samples from the survivor, and all six of those people were excluded.

The problem that this creates in South Africa is there is an enormous ignorance regarding scientific evidence and regarding DNA evidence in particular, and, to be quite honest, the large proportion of people will never have heard the word DNA in their lives before. The community that this took place in were fully convinced that all six of these people had in fact raped this baby, and they were waiting for justice to be done the way they would like to have seen it be done. They were then all excluded by those DNA profiles that were obtained and indicated a different profile of a person unidentified. We went through an additional 42 potential suspects until the perpetrator was apprehended, and the fact of the matter is there was an eyewitness physically to this rape that took place.

This is the kind of media coverage that we did get of this: They're a savage species. I hear they rape their young. This provides us with an enormous challenge in South Africa to try and address these kind of problems.