However, Joseph was arrested on a charge of high treason in December 1956 as a result of her anti-apartheid activism. In 1957, Joseph was banned from publicly opposing the government through her speech and protests. The treason trial dragged on for four years and she was acquitted in 1961. Joseph was one of six Jewish women on trial, the others being Ruth First, Yetta Barenblatt, Sonia Bunting, Dorothy Shanley, and Jacqueline Arenstein. While on trial for treason, Joseph learned that the government was forcing people out of the country and into remote areas if they were thought to have violated apartheid laws. In 1962, Joseph found most of the banished people then reunited them with their families and gave them supplies. In spite of her acquittal, Helen Joseph became on 13 October 1962 the first person placed under house arrest under the Sabotage Act introduced by the apartheid government. She narrowly escaped death more than once, surviving bullets shot through her bedroom and a bomb wired to her front gate. In May, 1971, she was briefly released from her house arrest in Norwood, a Cape Town suburb, so that she could receive cancer surgery at a hospital in Johannesburg. By then she had spent 3,145 consecutive days at home, despite never having been convicted of a crime, Her final banning order was lifted in 1985 when she was 80 years old and had spent 23 years in confinement.