Editor's note: This story and video contain mature subject matter. ESPN does not generally identify victims of sexual abuse. These women agreed to tell their stories.

KWA THEMA, South Africa -- In the small, neat home she shares with a husband she describes as a broken man, Mally Simelane talks about her daughter, Eudy, who two years ago was gang-raped and stabbed to death.

Eudy Simelane's mother, Mally, at her grave. Joel and Jesse Edwards for E:60

"These children are ours," she says, her hands folded across her kitchen table. "The gays and lesbians. I mean, we must accept our children. What they like, it's up to them. We are not God to stop them."

But there are those who are trying to stop them. And to punish them. To scare them. To change them. To "correct" them.

At the time of her murder, Eudy Simelane was almost a decade removed from her career on the South African women's national soccer team. But at 31, she had become a well-respected youth coach, a passionate ambassador for the game she loved. Everyone knew she was gay.

At Eudy's grave -- not far from the creek where her tormentors dumped her mutilated corpse -- Mally says, "I look at her picture. Then pray. Cry. Talk to her. Telling her, 'I miss you.'"

The rationale?

For an act of such violence and malice, it's called something so clinical: "corrective rape."

"The phenomenon of corrective rape is based on the mistaken belief that through the violent act of rape, you can alter someone's orientation, you can alter their identity," says Jody Kollapen, the former chairman of the South African Human Rights Commission, a governmental organization. "The rationale would be that a woman who chooses to be lesbian has surely not had a relationship with a man, and therefore, if she has a relationship with a man, even if it's a violent, forced one, that will surely convince her that the lifestyle she chose is inappropriate."

Eudy Simelane's grave in the township of Kwa Thema. Joel and Jesse Edwards for E:60

Sometimes, as in the case of Eudy Simelane, the perpetrators of corrective rape are interested less in changing their victims than in eradicating them and sending a message to other South African lesbians, who, recent studies show, live in a heightened state of fear -- with good reason.

In the country with the most reported rapes per capita in the world, where it is estimated that nearly half of all women will be raped, so-called corrective rape represents only a fraction of the sexual assaults committed. The exact numbers are impossible to determine -- in part because South Africa has no hate-crime laws that would require authorities to classify corrective rapes separately from other rapes -- but, according to the Human Rights Commission, it is a growing phenomenon. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming; for instance, the Triangle Project, a gay and lesbian advocacy organization, says it is dealing with 10 new cases of corrective rape every week in Cape Town alone.

A disproportionate number of female athletes have been victims, if only because more are openly gay as Simelane was. On paper, South Africa is among the world's most progressive countries; its constitution emphasizes the rights of the individual, and gay marriage is legal. But South Africa's constitutional aspirations run up hard against certain realities. Before his election, President Jacob Zuma was tried for raping (not corrective rape) an 18-year-old family acquaintance. He was acquitted, but his attitudes about gay marriage -- which he has condemned -- and gays and lesbians in general reflect the prejudices of many of his constituents.

"When I was growing up, [a homosexual] would not have stood in front of me," Zuma said. "I would knock him out."

The rape and murder of Simelane brought the issue of corrective rape to the nation's attention, however briefly, but the situation for lesbians has not improved. On the contrary, it seems to be deteriorating. Talk to men in the impoverished townships, and you see why. Homophobia is rampant. Violence against lesbians is encouraged. And victims say even the police treat them as nuisances and mock them.

Corrective rape is primarily an issue in South Africa's predominantly black townships. Although there are no statistics to show that the majority of victims are black lesbians, the Triangle Project says that 86 percent of black lesbians in the Western Cape live in fear of sexual assault, as opposed to 44 percent of white lesbians.

Mvuleni Fana

Eleven years ago, when she was 16, Mvuleni Fana was walking down a small side street in Daveyton, a township outside Johannesburg, a few hundred yards from the soccer stadium where she played for her local girls team.

Mvuleni Fana no longer plays soccer. She was raped in a stadium after soccer practice when she was 16. Joel and Jesse Edwards for E:60

Then, Fana remembers, four young men -- she knew them from the soccer fields -- attacked her, knocking her down, dragging her to the stadium.

"I remember some of the things," Fana says now. "I don't remember clearly, but I remember when they took my clothes off."

Fana was raped, beaten, and left battered and unconscious at the stadium. She woke up in a hospital. Her assailants, she says, had taunted her about her sexual orientation.

"You could hear in their voices that I disgust them," she says. "They wanted to teach me a lesson. They wanted to show me who's the man. They wanted me to stop being a lesbian."

When Fana went with her aunt to the police to report the attack, she says she was again taunted: "They say, 'She deserve everything. How can she pretend to be a guy. Why, she's a girl. There's no such thing as gay. A woman is a woman, and a man is a man.'"

Fana says that after the attack, she could never bring herself to play soccer again.

Prejudice still exists

South Africa's mostly peaceful transition from minority white control to democracy in the early 1990s was a triumph of domestic diplomacy. Averting civil war was a modern miracle. But South Africa remains a dangerous place, and the legacy of apartheid is a legacy of violence. Corrective rape, which is primarily a black-on-black crime in South Africa, cannot be blamed entirely on apartheid; it is part of the equation, however.