On December 12, CNN reported an outbreak of infant rapes in Johannesburg, South Africa.The article, written by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, also states that 21,000 cases of child rape were reported to police in the past year. That’s just the number that the police know about; estimates of unreported abuse are much higher.

In Africa, the AIDS epidemic truly lives up to its name — fully 1 in 8 South Africans are infected with the disease. Outside the country, the continent as a whole is the largest concentration of AIDS-afflicted individuals in the world. Lack of proper birth control and disease education is the biggest problem facing Africans today.

Disease education is so bad that many tribes believe that having sex with a virgin will abolish AIDS from your body. This myth is hardly a breaking story, but while we pour money into finding a cure, telling those with HIV that all you’re doing when you rape a virgin is giving her AIDS as well is probably money even better spent. Prevention and information over eradication.

How ridiculous is it that there is a mindset out there advocating the brutalizing attack of a woman as a means of disease control? How ridiculous is it that in a two-week period in December, dozens of infants were raped?!

What a world we live in.

Thankfully, we have media sponges like Winnie Mandela crusading against an obvious evil. Excuse me while I suppress my sarcasm.

It doesn’t take protests against infant abuse for everyone except the sick animals committing the crime to know that this is just horribly wrong. It’s applaudable that enough people can mobilize for against a movement like this, but really, do we need Winnie Mandela carrying around a sign like the one to the right?

Obviously raping babies doesn’t cure AIDS. Maybe Mandela should focus her efforts and her troops and get them into the tribal locations with literature and dedicated volunteers to spread that little nugget of information. Even China, the most ass-backwards country in the world with regards to human rights, acknowledges the threat of HIV infection.

The South African government reports 1500 new cases of AIDS a day. More than a million will die of the disease in the country by the end of 2008. Nevirapine, a anti-retroviral innoculant, is being tested in 18 hospitals around the country — why wait two years to see how the tests pan out?

25-year-old coal miner Justice Nemukombame said it worst: “Some people still believe AIDS is a myth. They don’t believe it’s real.”

No protest will solve that mindset.