Female homicidal strangulation in urban South Africa.docVIP

BMC Public Health BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Female homicidal strangulation in urban South Africa Shahnaaz Suffla*, Ashley Van Niekerk and Najuwa Arendse Address: MRC-UNISA Crime, Violence and Injury Lead Programme, P.O. Box 19070, Tygerberg, 7505, South Africa Email: Shahnaaz Suffla* - ssuffla@mrc.ac.za; Ashley Van Niekerk - ashley.vanniekerk@mrc.ac.za; Najuwa Arendse - najuwa.arendse@mrc.ac.za * Corresponding author Published: 21 October 2008 Received: 24 June 2008 Accepted: 21 October 2008 BMC Public Health 2008, 8:363 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-8-363 This article is available from: /1471-2458/8/363 ? 2008 Suffla et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Female strangulation in South Africa occurs in a context of pervasive and often extreme violence perpetrated against women, and therefore represents a major public health, social and human rights concern. South African studies that provide accurate descriptions of the occurrence of strangulation incidents among female homicide victims are limited. The current study describes the extent, distribution and patterns of homicidal strangulation of women in the four largest South African metropolitan centres, Tshwane/Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Ethekwini/Durban. Methods: The study is a register-based cross sectional investigation of female homicidal strangulation, as reported in the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System for the four cities, for the period 2001 to 2005. Crude, unadjusted female strangulation rates for age and population group, and proportions of strangulation across specific circumstances of occurrence were compiled for each year and