caa a22 4500 386371253 CHVBK 20180307111959.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1989 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0021855300008111 doi S0021855300008111 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0021855300008111 Armstrong Alice Evidence in Rape Cases in Four Southern African Countries [Elektronische Daten] [Alice Armstrong] Evidentiary rules applicable to rape and other sexual offence cases, inherited from nineteenth-century England and based on Victorian notions of women's behaviour, are alive and well in twentieth-century southern Africa. These are the cautionary rules which require a trial judge to warn him or herself of the danger of convicting a rape accused without corroboration, or independent evidence supporting the testimony of the complainant. These rules are applied because the evidence of the complainant in a sexual case is considered to be "suspect”: she is variously said to be prone to lie for reasons of her own, prone to fantasy, and prone to exaggerate. Although the cautionary rule of corroboration is still applied in many countries, most progressive and feminist thinkers consider them to be "a lingering insult to women”. In this article I will canvass the cautionary rules on evidence in sexual cases in southern Africa and attempt to show that they are not only based on outmoded stereotypes, but are also particularly unsuitable to southern Africa. Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1989 Journal of African Law Cambridge University Press 33/2(1989), 172-184 0021-8553 33:2<172 1989 33 JAL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021855300008111 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021855300008111 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Armstrong Alice NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of African Law Cambridge University Press 33/2(1989), 172-184 0021-8553 33:2<172 1989 33 JAL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge