Online Reporter
ALL murder and killings have a peculiar horror, as to all other preventable deaths such as those caused by neglect or accident, but ritual murder and deaths from sexual attack attract particular loathing, since the killing and suffering are the sole reason for the fatal assault.
While people die in robberies and other violent crime and people are killed in road accidents or are left to die because no one cares enough, the perpetrators of these crimes do not have death as the main aim of their crime and in some cases might well be horrified that their criminal actions or bad driving result in a death.
But embedded in these ordinary crimes and criminal deaths are those where the main purpose, or the only purpose of the crime, is to kill and preferably cause a great deal of pain and suffering during the murder.
In the case of ritual murders and some sexual murders, the killers even think they have some sort of entitlement to cause pain, suffering and death to gratify their desires or to benefit themselves. This simply adds to the horrors.
President Mnangagwa brought up these special classes of deliberate murder and assault this week, making it clear that they were not, had never been and could never be part of Zimbabwe or even be understandable by most Zimbabweans.
There has recently been the horrifying discovery of three dead children in the boot of an abandoned car in Harare’s Kuwadzana suburb.
Local communities tended to assume that they were ritual murders, although the police made it clear they had yet to discover any evidence.
But regardless of why the children were killed, or were allowed to die of neglect, the police must press forward until they discover the perpetrators.
Children do not just die in a boot of a car, or have their bodies stashed there.
The High Court might no longer have the instant death penalty available as a sentence, but such murders seem to be high on the list of crimes that deserve a full life sentence, that is the killer dies eventually in jail.
We would assume that as we get more precise over our life sentences, and bring in the planned parole boards, that the sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole will be there for the worst of all killings.
Murder rates do rise, although most homicides are tried as culpable homicide, or manslaughter in common law jurisdictions, that is the person responsible for the death had no intention of killing or causing death, but took action that a reasonable person would recognise could lead to serious injuring or death.
But the rise in murders is contained within the rise in population, meaning it is not getting worse.
One reason for what are low murder rates, once the culpable homicides are excluded is that the police give an absolute priority to hunting down and arresting killers, even in bad times when resources are stretched almost beyond bearing.
The number of unsolved murders in Zimbabwe is very small and even here in many cases the police are almost certain who committed the crime and that this person has vanished over a border.
Even the ritual murderers, or would be murderers, have largely understood that such a killing is not going to bring riches, but just decades in a cell in a maximum security prison and a lonely death behind bars.
The other set of crimes the President referred to are the sexual crimes.
Here again the police are prepared to hunt down the perpetrators, but there is still some reluctance in some quarters to reporting these crimes.
While statistics are growing, a lot of this growth comes from the greater willingness of those who are assaulted in such crimes to come forward.
When we look at the changes in society and the progress made in the last few decades we note that people are ever less willing to believe that someone sexually assaulted was “asking for it” or was in some way to blame.
Being assaulted is being assaulted and those committing such assaults must answer for them in court.
The judiciary has become a lot more skilled in sorting out the evidence and the stories, and in those cases where the assault appears to be an extortion attempt that went wrong, are not afraid to say so.
But generally the justice system works well and by the time a sexual assault reaches court the evidence is good enough to prove assault, just leaving the question of whether the person before the courts was the one responsible.
Once again tough sentences, and sentences for sexual assault have been rising over the last three to four decades, coupled with competent police work has been containing the crime and with ever better reporting from the public will be making inroads.
While all crime needs to be stopped, we need the maximum effort on crimes of assault and murder, making sure that all investigations reach a conclusion.
