Accommodation and consolidation of control: competing perceptions of justice and social order in the taxi transport industry

Abstract

During April 1999, a young woman from Guguletu, an informal settlement near Cape Town, was viciously assaulted and raped by ten mostly under-aged men living in the same area. She reported the rape to the local police station and two of
the rapists were arrested, appeared in court, and were released on bail. The next day they were back on the crime infested streets of this impoverished sqnatter area Though five of the other alleged rapists were living in the same community, they were not arrested and seemed to have escaped the police and the judicial system. Like most Guguletu residents, the woman then lived in fear of reprisal in a society unprotected from the activities of criminals and with the state conspicuously absent.