South Africa Violence Against Women Rate Hightest In The World

JOHANNESBURG -- Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law graduate shot and killed by Oscar Pistorius, was statistically just one of three women killed on Valentine's Day by an intimate partner, according to a study on violence against women that damns South Africa as having "the highest rate ever reported in research anywhere in the world."

Steenkamp's killing came the day before she planned to wear black in a "Black Friday" protest against the country's excruciatingly high number of rapes, spurred by the particularly brutal gang-rape and mutilation of a 17-year-old that made front-page news in February. The girl managed to identify an ex-boyfriend among her attackers before she died.

As the world marks International Women's Day, South Africans are locked in public soul-searching over the high level of murders and rapes perpetrated against women.

In the past month, among other cases in South Africa: a court charged a man accused of chopping up and beheading his wife with a machete; police arrested a 29-year-old accused of raping a 2-year-old toddler fighting for her life in the hospital; and police are investigating the rape of a 100-year-old great-great grandmother. Police still are hunting for two of 15 men accused of gang raping a 23-year-old woman. Her ordeal lasted hours