Before the slogans arrive and inboxes fill with campaign messaging, we need to ask a harder question: who cares for the carers? Every year, 16 Days of Activism reminds us to stand with survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). But we rarely ask about the people who stand with them every day – the paralegals at community advice centres, the social workers in underresourced townships, the counsellors who absorb the weight of trauma that is not theirs, yet becomes theirs to carry.
Many of these frontline staff are burning out. They are underpaid, overburdened and expected to hold survivors in systems that barely hold them. When they leave – exhausted or disillusioned – survivors are failed twice: once by the violence itself, and again by a system that cannot sustain those who make it work.
Burnout is usually treated as a personal weakness. The solutions offered are equally personal: counselling sessions, “self-care” workshops or a day off that never comes. This framing isolates the worker, medicalises their exhaustion and ignores the structural conditions that produce it. It tells a paralegal who spends hours drafting affidavits and explaining court processes that she must “manage her stress” while her caseload grows and her stipend barely covers transport. It tells a social worker juggling dozens of families in crisis that she must “practise resilience” even as she faces the same violence in her own community.
I know this not only from research but from my own life. For years I worked in the GBV sector as a human rights attorney. Each criminal justice failure felt like a personal failure. Every acquittal, every case that collapsed under the weight of delay or indifference, landed on my shoulders as if I had failed the survivor myself. On top of that came the stress of donor reports, the endless management of people and projects, the constant sense that I was not doing enough. Slowly I began to believe that if justice was not delivered, it was because I had not worked hard enough or sacrificed enough.
What I had lost sight of was that it had never been mine to carry alone. In the professionalisation of my role, I forgot Rethabile Mosese the person – the one who belongs in community, who is not a saviour. My work was never to heal others or to empower them. It was to create the space where they could heal themselves, and to remember that I too needed to be held.
African feminist thought offers a different lens. Care is not something we give to others; it is a space we create together. Ubuntu reminds us: I am because we are. Burnout is not an individual failure; it is a collective fracture. Jessica Horn has written powerfully about this: emotional wellbeing is political. It cannot be outsourced to private therapy rooms while the structures that produce exhaustion remain untouched.
Survivors themselves know this. They often say what sustained them was not a single counselling session, but the community that surrounded them: the neighbour who checked in, the group that sang with them, the paralegal who stayed late to explain a court form, the social worker who found a way to stretch resources so no one was turned away. Why should it be different for those who support survivors?
We need workplaces where staff check in with each other not only about case files, but about how they are holding up. We need collective rituals of closure after difficult cases – song, prayer, shared meals – so that trauma does not sit unspoken in the body. We need colleagues who insist that one another take leave, not as a luxury but as a duty to the community. And we need funding models that build in time and resources for collective care, not just service delivery metrics.
This is not indulgence. It is infrastructure. Without it, the system collapses. When a paralegal leaves because she cannot carry the weight alone, survivors lose trust. When a social worker is forced to choose between her own child’s needs and the families she supports, the promise of protection cracks. When staff are treated as expendable, survivors learn that they too are expendable.
As we approach 16 Days of Activism, let us not wait for the slogans to arrive. Let us ask now: what kind of system are we building, and who is being asked to hold it up? If we want a response to GBV that lasts beyond these 16 days, we must stop outsourcing resilience to individuals and start building communities of care.
Survivors do not need staff who are told to “be strong”. They need staff who are sustained by the same solidarity we claim to value. That is the politics of ubuntu. That is how we move from campaigns to systems that actually hold survivors, staff and communities together. DM