It is arresting that, in a week of high emotion after the bodies of nine women were discovered on Joburg’s East Rand, we have again heard the same tired pledges from politicians that we “must act” against gender-based violence (GBV).
Now, violence against women is hardly a new threat to our society, with 10 women killed every day, on average. And yet our politicians act as if they have had no agency in stopping this scourge. Our ministers, on public podiums, suddenly become disenfranchised activists, pretending they weren’t mandated to detect and arrest those responsible.
“Women and children deserve to feel safe in their homes, communities and public spaces,” said Dina Pule, South Africa’s compromised minister of social development. “Ending GBV is a responsibility we all share.”
Now there’s no great insight there. Pule isn’t wrong — but it hardly helps to speak of what society “deserves” when you are part of the governance machinery paid to deliver that.
The extent of this failure is clear in the police’s initial ambivalence about declaring that these murders were evidence of a “serial killer”, or simply a series of unconnected deaths. It is, in other words, a war zone.
Around the country, we’ve seen a justifiable wave of outrage at the Ekurhuleni murders, from runners expressing solidarity with those killed, such as Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, or those on social media condemning GBV.
But hashtags alone don’t change the world.
Nechama Brodie, an academic and author of Femicide in South Africa, has written powerfully about this moment in the past week on News24, warning that rhetoric can lead to platitudes.
Brodie pointed out that an earlier campaign, including a countrywide day of protest, had culminated in femicide being declared a “national disaster”, but this was a largely empty victory because it had little practical meaning.
“Campaigns drive clicks, but they don’t create any real change,” she wrote. “A good slogan isn’t going to make women safer.”
Contrary to the hysteria on social media, Brodie said the numbers show that femicide has actually declined 41% over the past two years. She puts the average number of women killed every day at 10. “The figures are still unacceptably high, but it’s a significant shift in the right direction,” she said.
Rather than social media posts, we need to focus on things that could make a difference, Brodie said. Police, for instance, need to release regular and accurate data on femicide — which they haven’t always done. Better detective work, with a focus on good quality forensic evidence, needs to become the standard.
Municipal officials, for their part, should improve municipal lighting — a key complaint raised by people living in Ekurhuleni as an immediate, actionable step. And, with that, metro police patrols should be more frequent.
For the rest of us, media should take care to fact-check the data and, Brodie said, “resist the urge to publish endless op-eds”. The public should help by paying for news, supporting women’s shelters and joining local community policing forums.
These are the practical steps that go beyond virtue-signalling hashtags.
This story — the nine bodies in Ekurhuleni — has made headlines across the globe, highlighting, again, South Africa’s violence, and the police’s impotence in addressing it. It reinforces a picture of a country where women, in particular, are profoundly unsafe. The cost of doing nothing more than shaking our fists is borne first by women, but it doesn’t end there.
