characters > charlene smith

Charlene Smith’s story

"You must prepare yourself for an unbelievably traumatic fight."

• Before the film
• Charlene proves to be the turning point in Cathy's search for justice

Before the film

Journalist Charlene Smith was sexually assaulted in her home in 1999. After the attack, she began a four-day process of writing her first article about what had happened. It was published a week after she was raped and it had a phenomenal impact on society. Charlene then continued a process of writing articles and discovered that it encouraged other people to come out and speak about sexual assault.

When filmmaker Cathy Henkel first met her, Charlene had already won numerous ‘Woman of the Year’ and ‘Person of the Year’ awards for her work as a campaigner for human rights, particularly in relation to sexual violence and HIV. She had also won many awards for her journalism, including the 2000 CNN African Journalist of the Year Award.

Charlene has dedicated herself to the fight in South Africa for a more compassionate criminal justice system, for better policing, and anti-retrovirals for people who are raped.

"We have just huge numbers of AIDS-affected people in this country and ironically we’re supposed to be a human rights' culture, but they are treated so badly and so I’ve become passionate about AIDS and the fight to prevent that and treat that and heal that as well."

Charlene proves to be the turning point in Cathy's search for justice

Charlene’s message for Cathy’s mother, Laura, proved to be a turning point in Cathy’s search for justice.

Charlene tells Cathy, "If you want the person to get caught, and you want the person to go to jail, you have to prepare yourself for an unbelievably traumatic fight. You have to fight and fight and fight. You get frustrated about the fact that you’re fighting with everyone. You have to fight with the police, you have to fight with the prosecutors, you have to fight with the medical officers. You have to fight with every single person. And in the end, for me, this was the worst thing that happened to me, and if I wanted justice I had to fight. If I wanted him to stop doing it to another woman, I had to fight. But it’s a difficult process. It’s a difficult process and you often want to give up because it’s very traumatic."

Charlene’s work as a journalist, and as facilitator of a sexual assault survivors’ group, means that she keeps up-to-date with, and reports on, the situation in South Africa:

"A woman is raped every 26 seconds. One in two South African woman will be raped at least once in her lifetime. I deal with rape survivors who’ve been raped three times, which is really difficult. Seventy-five percent of rape is gang rape. You’re more likely to be raped by three to 30 perpetrators than by a single individual. [There is] a very, very high rate of incest. We have a particular problem at the moment, because our incidence of HIV is so high, that there is a very high rate of virgin rape. There is a belief that if you rape a virgin, you can cleanse yourself of HIV. Last year we saw a doubling of child rape."

It was at a lunchtime meeting of her survivors' group that Charlene introduced Cathy to Glory.

Find out more...

 South African response