Women’s Month has come and gone. For a few weeks, issues about women dominated the national discourse. From marches, speeches, hashtags to radio and TV talk shows, issues of women’s emancipation and gender-based violence (GBV) set the news agenda.
And, no sooner had August ended than the conversation on women quietened. As is the norm, it appeared that we were waiting for another calendar cycle to rekindle the topic – the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, running from 25 November to 10 December. The scenario is so familiar – year after year.
But then, news broke of the possibility of a serial killer on the prowl in Kempton Park – jolting the nation out of its complacency. By Monday, bodies of five women had been discovered in a thicket in and around Rhodesfield and Olifantsfontein along the R21 freeway in just two months. With that, the national discourse shifted to gender issues all over again.
A dangerous place
Much has since been said, but the conversation points to the perennial problem: South Africa remains among the most dangerous places for women to live. Women can do as much as they want to stay safe, but their personal safety habits are simply not adequate to fully protect themselves.
It is not that women cease to require assistance in addressing the gap; rather, there is a problem when our focus on the safety of women and children is dictated by a cyclical calendar of campaigns.
This attention is often fleeting, activated by specific dates rather than being a constant commitment driven by the realities of everyday existence. When the microphones are silenced, the panels conclude and the hashtags fade into obscurity, a profound silence envelops the discourse. As the digital noise quiets, the real work begins, challenging us to confront the realities that persist beyond public engagement.
A daily language of fear
For countless women in South Africa, the daily routine unfolds in a familiar, yet unsettling manner: a hand instinctively reaches for a mobile phone, muted in anticipation of potential threats, while keys are gripped tightly.
Each step is accompanied by a meticulously rehearsed mental map of the journey home, crafted long before departure, whether the destination is the workplace, a local shop, or a family visit. Which route is safer? Should I wait for someone to walk me to the car? Should I share my location? Is it too late to leave? Should I tell someone where I am going?
These questions are not the language of freedom. Neither are they triggered by paranoia. They are the language of fear – warranting a well-practised daily mantra for survival.
For many women, some of the crimes come as a blast from the past. Seventy years ago, Black women confronted a state determined to control their mobility through the enforcement of apartheid pass laws.
Today, the passbook is gone. Yet the deeper question of whether a woman can move through society freely and safely remains disturbingly relevant.
The comparison must be made carefully. Apartheid’s pass laws and contemporary gender-based violence are not the same thing. One was an explicit instrument of racial state power. The other can take the form of threats, coercion, stalking, intimate-partner violence, assault and murder.
The point is not equivalence. The point is power. Who gets to determine where a woman can go? Who makes her feel that certain streets, places, times or relationships are too dangerous to enter? Who decides the conditions under which she can exercise a freedom that is supposed to belong to her as a human being and as a citizen? These questions cannot be confined to Women’s Month.
A functioning justice system
The South African Police Service reported 50,511 cases of gender-based violence and femicide during the 2025/26 financial year, with 30,736 resulting in arrests and/or referrals to the National Prosecuting Authority.
Referral is not the same as justice, and successful prosecution is what ultimately makes accountability real. In 2024/25, the National Prosecuting Authority recorded a 70.5% conviction rate for sexual offences, with 3,723 convictions from 5,282 cases. During the same period, 44,147 victims were supported through the Thuthuzela Care Centre model, while the NPA and SAPS DNA/Serial Rape project analysed more than 30,000 DNA reports to accelerate the identification and prosecution of serial rapists.
These figures show that investigation and prosecution can contribute to accountability, but they also remind us that justice depends on what happens after a woman reports violence. Effective investigations, competent prosecution and appropriate consequences for perpetrators are not merely administrative requirements. They are part of deterrence. A hashtag cannot deter a man who calculates that he is unlikely to be caught, charged or convicted. A functioning justice system can.
Many forms of control
Behind those figures are women and girls whose lives have been disrupted by violence, intimidation, fear, and in some cases, death. These figures tell only part of the story. Violence is frequently underreported. There are women who never reach a police station, never make a report, never tell a family member and never become part of a statistic.
Sometimes violence does not begin with a fist. It begins with a question – “Where are you going?”, then, “Who will be there? Why are you wearing that? You are not going. If you leave, you will see what happens.”
In an intimate relationship, control can take many forms before physical violence becomes visible: isolation from friends, restrictions on work, monitoring of phones, demands for constant location updates, financial dependence, threats and humiliation. By the time violence becomes visible, a woman may already have spent months or years adjusting her movements to someone else’s dictates.
This is why treating women’s safety as primarily a woman’s responsibility is such a matter of grave concern. Do not walk there or travel alone. Do not come home late. Do not leave him or make him angry. Share your location. Carry your phone. Find someone to accompany you.
Some of these measures may indeed save a woman’s life. But there is something fundamentally wrong when society becomes better at teaching women how to anticipate violence than it is at preventing violence from happening to them. We should elevate the discourse.
Why must a woman constantly calculate the risk attached to exercising an ordinary freedom? Why should going to work, attending a social gathering, travelling home, leaving an abusive relationship or simply walking through a public space require a personal safety strategy? At what point does precaution become another form of restriction?
An internalised checkpoint isn’t freedom
We have replaced the bureaucratic checkpoint with an internalised one. The state no longer needs to stamp restrictions on a document if fear has already taught a woman to regulate her movement. That is not the freedom women fought for.
Merely asserting that women are constitutionally equal is insufficient. Rights on paper matter, but freedom is also lived in the body. It is experienced in whether a woman can walk home without fear, leave a relationship without fearing retaliation, travel without constantly checking who is behind her, or occupy public space without calculating whether she will make it home safely. Of course, risk is not experienced equally.
A woman with a private car, secure housing and financial independence may face different risks from a student walking from a taxi rank, a domestic worker returning home after a late shift, or a woman in a rural community dependent on limited public transport. Race, class, geography and economic power shape vulnerability differently. However, fear transcends these distinctions. That is why the responsibility cannot rest with individual women.
It is imperative that families, communities, schools, institutions, the state and men acknowledge their share of responsibility. It is obligatory that men engage in the solution, not as saviours or messiahs of women, but as people with a responsibility to challenge behaviours and cultures that normalise control, humiliation and violence.
Safety and accountability aren’t luxuries
Institutions must stop treating women’s safety as something women must individually manage as their problem or liability. Safe public transport, responsive policing, accessible support services, effective investigations and meaningful consequences for perpetrators are not luxuries. They are conditions of freedom. This is why what happens after August matters.
If we commemorate women’s struggles in one month and then allow the conversation to quieten until the next campaign, we risk turning a continuing struggle into a calendar event. Commemoration has value. Nations need memory. But memory without accountability can become ceremony without transformation.
The women who challenged apartheid’s control over their movement did not march so that future generations of women could exchange one form of restriction for another, or so that women could be legally free while remaining socially conditioned to fear where they go, when they leave, who they leave with and whether they will return safely.
The right to live without being on guard
In a few months, the country will once again enter the 16 Days of Activism period. We will hear the statistics. The promises. Calls for action. But before then, and after it ends, women will still have to live. That is the uncomfortable space we rarely discuss: the ordinary days between the campaigns. The days when there is no microphone, television panel, commemorative event and no hashtag.
Just a woman deciding whether she feels safe enough to walk through a particular street, leave a particular relationship, take a particular taxi, return home after dark or simply live without constantly being on guard. Perhaps this is the conversation we should be having now, before the next round of speeches begins. Not simply: how do women protect themselves?
But why do women continue to need so much protection in the first place? The test of freedom is not simply whether the law permits a woman to go somewhere. The test is whether she can go there without fear. August is over. The conversation must continue. DM
Comments
Scroll down to load comments...