Senior male prison officials have been accused of abusing their power over junior colleagues, including sexually abusing female juniors.
Now Parliament wants the Department of Correctional Services to act, while blaming it for having failed dismally to deal with it before.
The chairman of the parliamentary oversight committee on correctional services, Vincent Smith, said it received daily complaints of abuse of power, especially sexual abuse.
“If there’s anything that we have received it is the abuse of power by senior officials; males abusing their power in relation to junior females – sexual abuse.
“Every day, we get it,” said Smith. “The abuse by virtue of rank is the one area we are failing dismally in, and unfortunately the victims seem to be young females.”
Correctional Services national commissioner Tom Moyane said the prevalence of sexual abuse was a cause for concern and the abuse of power had become a focus of the administration.
The department was going through an organisational transformation, and as it made changes it was finding “pockets of resistance where in this matter it was not going to be easy”.
Moyane said the department would have to take a significant number of officials through training.
Smith said later he did not think the rate of sexual abuse was necessarily increasing, but that staff were raising it more when the committee went on oversight visits.
“We were at St Alban’s (in Port Elizabeth) at the end of July and the staff raised it and this past Sunday I received a similar type of complaint, but am waiting for details,” he said. - Political Bureau