The Sunday News
Simba Jemwa, Sunday News Correspondent
IT’S Friday night and Tanya (not her real name) is readying for a night out with her friends. She is 19 years old, lives a comfortable life in one of Bulawayo’s leafy suburbs and a regular on the party scene.
She is a member of what has come to be known as the 2k generation (Ama two thousand)!
She dons her make up, her sexy little mini dress and scents herself with the best that only her South African-based parents can buy. Her bestie sends her a WhatsApp chat and tells her to be at the gate in five minutes. Like clockwork, her friend and their coterie of friends drive to the boutique braai spot where copious amounts of Shisha and booze are taken.
As the evening wears on, Tanya begins to feel nauseous and cannot understand why. She attempts to recollect just how much of the alcohol she has had but is soon out cold before that happens.
As the birds chirp their summer morning song, Tanya opens her eyes to an unfamiliar view of a bedroom and immediately feels a little dread. As she continues to awaken, she realises that her body feels like it has been violated and quickly realises that she clearly has had sexual intercourse with someone but cannot remember who or when during the course of the night.
She cries herself to sleep, wakes up a little later and goes home and for days cannot leave the confines of her room. It has dawned on her that during the ‘drinks’, she has fallen victim to the latest date rape scourge in Bulawayo: drink spiking.
Going for a night out with friends is meant to be one of the most carefree, joyous experiences of youth: the chance to dance in a roomful of people who, like you, are only there to have fun. Hangovers should never be more than a minor downside.
But for many young women, that experience is now shot through with anxiety. The phenomenon of “spiking” – where a stranger drugs your drink, leaving you incapacitated and unable to remember what happened to you – has been known for many years, frequently as a grim prelude to sexual assault.
For Tanya, the worst part of her nightmare is that she cannot remember where it happened, when it happened or who she had sex with. And she is so ashamed of waking up at a lodge that she dares not ask the staff to help her identify her attacker.
According to Tanya and her friends, there has been a spate of reports of such occurrences in the city of late, a trend that began at the many ‘house parties’ that ruled the roost during Covid-19 lockdown bar closures and has left a new generation of party goers worried for their safety and angry that more is not done to ensure they are protected.
“I left home at around 9 pm when my friends came to pick me up and we went for a braai at a favourite spot. We started drinking and smoking shisha and having fun. At some point I remember some guys joining us and from then on, I don’t remember much except waking up in a lodge alone in bed,” Tanya shares her harrowing experience.
“I was so ashamed I couldn’t ask the people at the lodge if they knew the person I had come with or if they could describe and I just left,” she said as she breaks down in tears.
Her friend told this publication that since Tanya’s incident, they have stopped drinking or going out or drinking out of fear. Asked why they haven’t gone to the police, the girls said they did not want to be ridiculed by their peers as ‘easy lays’ or that their parents find out that they have been going out drinking and smoking.
“We thought about going to the police but we didn’t want our friends finding out and then the boys thinking we are easy lays. We also thought about the trouble we would get into with our parents if this ever came out,” Tanya’s friend Lebo (also not her real name).
There are reports of spiking by injection, and while experts may suggest that these cases should be viewed with caution, in part because of the level of expertise required to carry out such an attack, it is clear that the shortcomings in security make the resulting fears only too understandable.
Concerns that club or bar owners are failing to take sexual violence against women seriously have been raised given the number of incidents of drinks being spiked without increased surveillance or security at local night spots.
This has also left young girls and women exposed to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
Meanwhile, a 22-year-old female spiking victim said that if the club owners or police did not take action on this epidemic of violence against women this would be another sign that society does not care.
The university student, who asked not to be named, believes her drink was spiked by a man at a recent friend’s private party which had between 150-200 people, which she attended with her friends two months ago.
Although she and her friends suspect they know who spiked her, they did not report the incident to the police because there was no closed circuit television (CCTV) or way of accounting for who was at the party.
“If it was in a club and you’ve got CCTV and you’ve got coherent bar staff and doormen then they could have pieced something together but this would have been impossible, so I didn’t go to the police. I felt really horrible afterwards,” she said.
Bulawayo night life is now awash with entertainment spots offering Shisha to its patrons, a phenomenon that has found a home among the youth mostly teens with a little money to burn.
It is a way of smoking tobacco or any thing for that matter, through a bowl with a hose or tube joined on. And in some instances, illicit drugs are added. The practice has also been largely criticised in the Covid-19 era, as patrons take turns to smoke from one pipe.
Popularly referred to as Ama two thousand, this generation of clubbers smokes Shisha a lot, drinks alcohol a lot and more often than not, will engage in drug abuse in one form or the other.
And now this penchant for clubbing and an early abuse of alcohol and recreational drugs by teens has made the local entertainment scene a fertile hunting ground for sexual predators who have taken to spiking girls’ drinks using what are popularly known as date drugs to ‘get some’.
A person’s drink can be spiked to make them more vulnerable for a variety of motives, including theft or sexual assault.
The effects of drink spiking vary depending on what one has been spiked with. Symptoms could include lowered inhibitions, loss of balance, feeling sleepy, visual problems, confusion, nausea, vomiting and unconsciousness.
The symptoms will depend on lots of factors such as the substance or mix of substances used (including the dose), the victim’s size and weight, and how much alcohol would have consumed. — @simbajemwa
