KZN police accused of not collecting rape kits from health dept

Police in KwaZulu-Natal have been accused of not collecting rape kits from the provincial health department.

These are among the concerns that have been raised by the Commission for Gender Equality in Durban.

The Commission has this week heard from different stakeholders on their responses to gender-based violence (GBV) cases in the province.

Chairperson of the Commission Advocate Nthabiseng Sepanya-Mogale, “We were told that you do not come to collect rape kids to a point where the rooms when they open the door, the rape kits come flying onto their faces. That’s not the only thing, General, that makes you shake your head. We shook our heads until they hit us with a final bomb. This was Department of Health that actually. Well, they’ve developed a protocol wherein they destroy those rape kits. And I want you to own that because you are in the front line only to find that they destroyed the evidence but they are saying we destroyed it because SAPS has not come back to us, we don’t know what to do.”

Responding to these claims, Deputy Provincial Commissioner responsible for crime detection, Major General Vukani Mgobhozi says he believes these allegations relate to incidents where people do not go through with the process of opening cases with the police.

He says when people do open cases of rape, police follow the protocols with regards to the collection of rape kits.

“These rape kits pertains to walk ins in the hospitals, there are no cases open. We had an agreement that it in cases of those kits there would be kept at the Thuthuzela centers for a period of 33months but we are in we are in contact with the people who came to the hospital, if they’re still insist that they are not willing to open the case then the kits have to be destroyed by the hospital.”