FIFA Misses Opportunity to Fight Corrective Rape in South Africa

In April of 2008, the body of South African National Women's Team soccer player Eudy Simelane was found gang-raped, brutally beaten, stabbed twenty-five times in the face and body, and left in a ditch in the district of Kwa-Thema on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

Simelane was well known for her campaigns for the equal rights for women, and was open about her lesbianism. She was a visible symbol of the lesbian culture that tends to dominate South African women's soccer, the soccer pitch being one of the few places where lesbian women can be openly out and supportive of one another.

Her death was a shock and an outrage to many in South Africa and was widely publicized; as a testament to how significant it was, one man was actually tried and found guilty of her murder. This is the first time anyone has been convicted in South Africa in the last decade in connection with a "corrective rape" case, in which a lesbian woman is raped supposedly with the purpose of "correcting" her lesbianism, but often with little more than homophobic hatred and resentment of women who challenge dominant male/submissive sexual female power dynamics. An average of 10 corrective rapes are reported every week in South Africa but as Zakhe Sowello, a lesbian living in Soweto, put it in The Guardian, "you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street."

Rape is not limited to lesbians, although they are often the victims of brutal hate crimes as well as sexual assault. A woman is raped in South Africa every 17 seconds. And yet, as the FIFA World Cup goes on to the triumphant buzz of Vuvuzelas and the TV networks show glossy shots of ecstatic male players, we hardly hear a thing about rape, and we certainly hear nothing about the rape and violent assault of lesbian soccer players.

In the 2006 World Cup, however, as The Guardian's Jennifer Doyle points out, players held banners reading "Say No To Racism" and players, coaches, and organizers read statements about the importance of fighting racism before the games as part of an official FIFA anti-racism campaign. This could not be in more stark contrast to the virtual silence around Eudy Simelane and the violence directed at women in general and lesbian women soccer players in particular.

FIFA had a chance to address one of South Africa's gravest problems and to send the message to female players that they had a place in the game, too, but the organization dismissed it entirely. The only coverage I have seen about women's soccer was on a site called The Global Game, which offers excellent soccer stories that are frequently ignored by the mainstream sports media. The Global Game profiled a lesbian women's soccer team called The Chosen Few and interviewed many of its players. All live in fear of corrective rape and violent assault; one player has already been a victim of corrective rape.

Apparently, FIFA is happy to use the World Cup's power to galvanize empathy and awareness about issues that affect men, but when it comes to women's issues, they'd rather just get on with the game.