This device sounds wonderful, although in the UK, mere possession of one would result in arrest for having an offensive weapon. If a woman used one resulting in injury as a rape defence measure, the rape victim would be classed as an aggressor and charged with GBH with the rapist classed as a victim and granted criminal injuries compensation!


Putting teeth in the fight against rape

By Amanda Bailly (Boston University) Student Correspondent Corps

BOSTON — Sonnet Ehlers looked into the eyes of the rape victim and saw nothing.

“Her eyes looked like marbles, totally dead,” said Ehlers, who was working as a medical researcher at Kimberley Hospital in the Northern Cape of South Africa when a 20-year-old South African woman was being treated for rape injuries.

But Ehlers remembers clearly one sentence the young woman uttered: “If only I had teeth down there.”

South African Ehlers made a promise to herself to "do something about this.” Forty years later, the result is the Rape-aXe, an anti-rape device with "teeth."

Rape-aXe is a flexible polyurethane condom-like tube that fits into the woman's body. Rows of jagged plastic hooks line the inside of the tube — bent backward like teeth in a shark’s mouth — and lodge in a perpetrator's penis upon entry. The perpetrator can withdraw from the woman, but the Rape-aXe remains clamped on. Trying to pull it off will cause discomfort.

Though the device causes great distress, it does not draw blood, Ehlers says, which is crucial in areas where HIV/AIDS rates are high. A man must seek medical attention to have the Rape-aXe removed. Until then, he cannot urinate, essentially tagging him until he gets to a hospital, she explains. Ehlers says she consulted an engineer, gynecologist and psychologist on the design.

Grace Faraja, 29, has lived through the constant fear of being raped. She lived most of her life in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before being granted refugee status and moving to New Hampshire in 2008. She says that if she were back in Congo, she would wear the Rape-aXe.

“What people need is this condom,” Faraja says. Especially when women are most vulnerable, at night and when traveling from one town to the next, she says. “When men hear about this,” Faraja says, “they will be scared. They won’t know who has protected herself and who not.”

But some critics are doubtful that the Rape-aXe will benefit women in conflict zones, where rape is used systematically as a weapon of war.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/100326/south-africa-rape-axe