A white South African high court judge is the subject of the latest in a series of race rows in the country after she said that black South African men regarded rape as a cultural right.

Mabel Jansen, a high court judge for the past three years who works in Pretoria, told commenters on a Facebook thread that "99 per cent" of her cases were "black fathers/uncles/brothers raping children as young as 5 years old", then asked one poster: "Is this part of your culture?"

She claimed that she was “yet to meet a black girl who wasn’t raped by the age of 12”. She said the “poverty etc” created by apartheid was “largely to blame” for South Africa’s widely-acknowledged sexual violence epidemic but added: "Fact: Apartheid existed. Fact: Black children and women are raped and abused and beaten and mistreated by black men to an extent that is so sickening one cannot even cope with it. And that is a FACT."