The on international Women’s Day set to be on 9th August 2013, the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust will introduce its Rape Information Portal on Mxit.
It will form part of Mxit’s “MySafety” app, which currently has 164 475 subscribers.
Lack of information and poor understanding of how the criminal justice system works prevents rape survivors from accessing justice, says a research report from Rape Crisis in 2011.
This portal will immensely improve the accessibility of information about rape to women, particularly in poorer and rural communities.
The app which they called RapeCrisis is currently available in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, filters 30 years of experience working with rape survivors into a simple yet comprehensive information package. Users can access the app by typing mxitapp.com/rapecrisis into a phone’s browser.
RapeCrisis will endow women with the evidence they need to sail across the journey towards justice and recovery. This multifaceted process has many steps including disclosure, reporting to police, a forensic examination and medical treatment, police investigation, court proceedings and counseling.
“Our mission is to act as a bridge between the rape survivor and the criminal justice system. Rape Crisis is committed to offering survivors information that is clear, accurate and accessible. The value of the Mxit mobile social network is that it is an inexpensive, easily accessible tool with enormous reach as it can work on nearly any phone. Women in poor and rural communities might not otherwise have had access to this vital information,” said Kathleen Dey, Rape Crisis Director.
Andrew Rudge, head of Mxit Reach, had this to say: “The MySafety app was created earlier this year in response to the Anene Booysen tragedy. Including the information from Rape Crisis increases the value of this app immeasurably as a tool to inform and empower our users.”