"Cry, the Misogynistic Country"?

Such was the title of a New York Times opinion piece today. The story concludes with the following line:

Mr. Pistorius, it would seem, is actually more typically South African than the exceptional story of his life might suggest.

South Africa certainly has extremely high rates of sexual assault, but one of the things that I was wondering was just how other crimes played out. South Africa also has an extremely high murder rate - it's currently ranked #12 in spite of the murder rate dropping 50% between 1994 and 2009. How likely are women to be murdered in South Africa? Here's what government data there shows:

An analysis of cases on the SAPS Crime Administration System (CAS), covering the period February 2002 to January 2003, for instance, indicated that 54% of victims of common assault, 40% of victims of assault GBH and 18% of victims of attempted murder were female.

Table 22 (p. 138) then shows that from the years 2000-2002 87% of murder victims were male. Those statistics are based upon police reporting. The following paragraph suggests that when victimization studies are conducted, males report being victims of assault more often than do women though, as the report indicates, it's unclear whether or not women are more likely to report such crimes.

In short, rape rates are extraordinarily high in South Africa. Similarly the vast majority of those convicted of murders are male. That said, while violence against women is unfortunately a common occurrence in South Africa, with women accounting for just 13% of murder victims the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp seems an exception to that particular pattern of violence rather than the norm.

Update: Apparently I should have kept skimming. Here's an excerpt of p. 139/140:

Based on 2001–02 murder rates, a recent paper indicates that the divergence between the male and female murder rates in South Africa is quite exceptional in global terms. Compared to a global homicide rate for women of four per 100 000, the South African rate for women at 12 per 100 000 was three times higher. By contrast, compared to the global homicide rate for men of 13,6 per 100 000, the South African rate of nearly 87 per 100 000 was more than six times higher. The implication is that men make up a far greater proportion of murder victims in South Africa than men do in most other countries.