ARE YOU REACTING TO HOAX EMAILS ? If you are a South African woman who frequents shopping malls, you will be adept at bladder management. You know that if you visit the toilets in a shopping mall, an armed felon will sneak in behind you, place his “cleaning in progress sign” across the entrance, rob you (or worse strip you of all your kit and then exit - leaving you to seek help from local Mugg & Bean patrons - in the knick. If you drive at night, it is likely that you have stopped being a responsible) caring citizen. You won’t flash your lights at an oncoming vehicle without its headlights on. You know that this is not simple human error and, if you flash, you will be chased down and murdered as part of a lethal gang initiation ritual. Good news! You can now pee and flash to your heart’s content. The one about ladies being accosted in shopping mall loos was a hoax that originated in 2002. The gang initiation ritual was also a hoax. It first surfaced in Los Angeles in the 1980’s. Most - if not all e-mail crime ‘warnings’ - are hoaxes. Having been relatively quiet on the hoax front in recent months, it seems that many of the old favourites are back in circulation. The World Cup ‘gees’ seems well and truly over and we are back to our old fear-mongering, nation-bashing tricks. What a shame. The question is - why do we feel the need to forward these hoax e-mails? As rational human beings, we should take one look at this stuff, roll our eyes and hit delete. But we don’t. We ignore the dodgy sources, the blurry police or Netcare logos and the poor grammar. We ignore the fact that many of them contain language that is clearly not ours using words like ‘restroom’ and ‘convenience store’. Such are our levels of helplessness regarding crime that mindlessly hitting ‘fw’ seems to make us feel like we are back in control and ‘doing our bit’. In truth, we are just authoring our own horror stories, perpetuating a culture of fear and alienating ourselves from our fellow South Africans. So how do you spot a hoax? Take a careful look at the following e-mail that is currently doing the rounds. An important message from The Police: This actually happened a few weeks ago on the N3 between Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
It was early evening and a young girl stopped to get petrol. She filled her tank and walked to the convenience store (convenience store? Not very South African). As she went to pay (note: this is now dearly a foreign e-mail as we pay for our petrol at the pump not in the store) the cashier told her ‘don’t pay yet... Walk around the store for a while and act as if you‘re picking up some other things to buy. A man just got into the back of your car. I’ve called the police and they’re on their way.’ When the police arrived, they found the man in the back seat of the girl’s car and asked him what he was doing. He replied, he was joining a gang and the initiation to join is to kidnap a woman and bring her back to the gang to be raped by every member. Now check this, out though. The following ‘warning’ appeared on a website in January 2008. It was posted by a woman living in Colchester, Great Britain. This actually happened a few weeks ago right here In England. It was early evening and a young lady stopped to get petrol. She filled her tank and walked into the store to pay for her petrol. The rest of the story is exactly the same as ours except that it includes this: According to the police that night, there is a new gang forming here (Colchester) originating from London. Simply by changing one or two details, place names, a word here or there - these stories become fun-and-games for hoaxers and peddlers of fear all over the world. The damage however is real: fear cripples us and, as long as we are living in fear of one another, we are unable to reach out to each other and mend the broken bridges.
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