I accept that on balance you are a gentle man.”In the ordinary way I would have considered a prison sentence, but I accept that yours is an unusual case.”The judge said she would not send him to prison as it would not serve the ends of justice. She imposed a Community Rehabilitation and Punishment Order, involving 100 hours of unpaid community service and two years of probation. She also ordered that he submit to compulsory psychiatric treatment for his depression.After all Katiza’s troubles it was the best possible outcome. After a lifetime of neglect, the judge had interpreted the law so that at last he gets counselling to sort out his troubled life.Afterwards he was asked by reporters about the crucial central question that has come to dominate his life. Did he still maintain that Mrs Mandela had killed Stompie Moeketsi? “It’s still the same,” he said “I’ve always said that I was there I am ashamed that I helped Mrs Mandela beat Stompie. So many people in South Africa did not want to believe me, but you have to ask: Why then did they abduct me from my own country and why am I here in England today?”.

Violence against girls and women should be added to the list of evils – guns, terrorism, discrimination and torture – that curtail freedom across the world, Amnesty International suggested yesterday. The parents of a 20-year-old man who discovered their son had logged on to internet suicide chatrooms before taking his life demanded a Home Office investigation yesterday. 14,000 recorded rapes in 2003 (up 8 per cent)Egypt: 97 per cent of married women aged 15 to 49 had female genital mutilationIndia: Approximately 15,000 dowry deaths a yearPakistan: At least a thousand women a year die in “honour” killingsChina: Ratio of newborn girls to boys 100:119; biological norm is 100:103Sierra Leone: More than half of all women suffered sexual violence during the 1999 conflictSource: Amnesty International. In 2001, when Theron’s Hollywood career was beginning to take off, she told her story in a three-minute television clip which she offered to South African television for broadcast, and in which she urged women to come forward and report crimes of assault and rape.Violence against womenUnited States A woman is raped every 90 seconds; four women die each day as a result of violence in the familyChile: Only 3 per cent of raped women report the attackMexico: Around Juarez at least 370 women have been murdered in the past 10 yearsRussia: 14,000 domestic violence deaths per yearBritain: Two women are killed a week in family violence; a call to emergency services every minute. Charlize Theron, who won the best actress Oscar last Sunday for her role in Monster, grew up in rural South Africa watching her alcoholic father beat her mother. Several countries, including Canada and the US, have granted asylum to women who had been sexually harassed or discriminated against.Celebrities have also joined the battle by speaking out.

In 1991 Charlize’s mother, Gerda, killed her father, Charles, with a shotgun A court found that Mrs Theron had acted in self-defence. Amnesty quotes an initiative in Sri Lanka in which a female sub-committee was created early last year to ensure gender issues were not ignored in the country’s peace talks. In Cambodia and India women have created local mediation bodies that help settle domestic disputes. In Brazil, special “women’s desks” have been set up in police stations.The African Union adopted a treaty on the human rights of women last year and the international war crimes courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have convicted perpetrators of rape and those who forced women into sexual slavery. On 11 March 2002, 15 girls in Mecca were burnt to death at their school after religious police prevented them from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves.Despite recording a regression in sex equality, the human rights group praises several initiatives around the world that have put women at the centre of efforts to improve societies. “They did this to me every day until I was pregnant so I would be forced to marry him,” said the woman.Amnesty criticises a US policy, in force since 2001, which restricts aid to countries with family planning programmes and legalised abortion.