Sexual assault: the system needs to be overhauled to offer more help

Rape survivor Tarryn Lokotsch uses her own horrific experience to improve GBV education and support other survivors in Mpumalanga. By Kiara Wales

- By Kiara Wales

On a late-April morning in 2021, Tarryn Lokotsch was brutally attacked and raped while on a run close to her home in Mataffin, Mbombela.

While in intensive care at a local hospital, she met Barbara Kenyon, founder of the Greater Nelspruit Rape Intervention Project Group (GRIP). After receiving counselling from Kenyon and learning more about the organisation’s work through her own recovery process, Lokotsch gained a passion for its cause.

Returning to work, Lokotsch found her job as an accountant “trivial”. “When you experience something like that, it’s very hard to just go back to normal life, because everyone is upset. But their lives go on while you just stay stuck in this state of shock and trauma and questions,” she says.

So, when Kenyon asked Lokotsch to become the new chief executive of GRIP in 2022, she agreed. “I could never just have gone on with my normal life knowing the system is so broken,” she says.

She describes the role as extremely challenging as GRIP deals with up to 10 cases a day. Some are quite personal for her because of her own experience.

“I have to just be professional and remember that it’s not about me or what happened to me — it’s about our survivors,” she says. “I have to use my own challenges, my own story and the gaps that I identified in the processes following that to help other people.”

Lokotsch recounts a lack of empathy being shown to her by officials in the aftermath of her assault. She was required to accompany investigating officers to the crime scene, a bend in the Crocodile River near Mbombela Stadium.