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Cape Town - Activists have expressed outrage about an attack by robbers on a woman in Khayelitsha whose eyes were gouged out - for a cellphone and earrings.
The woman, 23-year-old Thembela Mjuleni, was left for dead just a few metres from her home in Mandela Park, Khayelitsha on Saturday night, the Cape Times reported.
One of Mjuleni’s suspected attackers has been arrested after community members found her belongings in his house.
Two gender rights activists said there had been a notable rise this year in violent attacks against women in Khayelitsha.
A counsellor who works with rape survivors in Khayelitsha said it was as if there was a “seething hate” behind many of the crimes.
Doctors say Mjuleni is in a stable condition in hospital.
A commission was set up to investigate policing in Khayelitsha after NGO the Social Justice Coalition complained that police inefficiency was the reason for mob killings becoming more prevalent in the area, Sapa reports.
Police told the commission that the Western Cape has the lowest staff complement of police in the country.
Brigadier Leon Rabie, an organisational design practitioner at police headquarters in Pretoria, testified in March that a recruitment drive was under way to increase the number of officers in the three most understaffed provinces in the country, including the Western Cape.
