Unequal Protection:

The South African government is failing to adequately protect residents of commercial farming areas from violent crime, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. Black farm residents are most severely affected by this failure, and black women are most vulnerable of all, Human Rights Watch said. The 230-page report, Unequal Protection: The State Response to Violent Crime on South African Farms, is being published in advance of next week’s United Nations conference on racism, to be held in Durban. It is based on research carried out by Human Rights Watch in rural areas of South Africa during 2000. The state response to violent crime against white farm owners and managers could and should be improved, Human Rights Watch said, but black farm workers and their families have much more difficulty getting help from the criminal justice system. In South Africa, where land ownership was restricted to whites for most of the twentieth century, most farm owners are still white, whereas farmworkers are mostly black. Since the early 1990s, there has been a marked increase in assaults and murders of the owners and managers of commercial farms and their families.