Over the last few weeks, bodies of nine women have been found discarded in Ekurhuleni. Some were partially clothed and some carried visible injuries. At least one had disappeared after leaving home for an ordinary afternoon run. Each of these women had a life violently taken from her, and each has left behind loved ones now living with an unimaginable loss.
Details surrounding these cases remain limited, leaving communities deeply concerned and unsettled. But we cannot ignore the fact that women are being killed with horrifying regularity in South Africa, and that our response all too often only accelerates once the worst has already happened.
In November 2025, gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) was formally classified as a national disaster under the Disaster Management Act. That classification recognised the persistent and immediate threat to life posed by violence against women and placed responsibility on the National Executive to coordinate the response. But today, almost a year later, we must ask ourselves: are we responding with the urgency that the words “national disaster” demand?
Consider that a 2025 national femicide study by researchers affiliated with the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and several local universities found that intimate partner femicide had increased from 4.9 per 100,000 women in 2017 to 5.5 in 2020/21. That latter rate was almost five times the comparable global average.
Additionally, by 2020/21, police had not identified the perpetrator in 44.2% of the female murders studied, compared with 18.6% in 1999. Only one in five perpetrators of intimate partner femicide were convicted. For women killed by non-intimate partners, the conviction figure fell to 13.2%.
These figures reflect the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 period and must therefore be interpreted carefully. But they nonetheless point to alarming weaknesses in the performance of our criminal justice system.
That is where citizens need to become more demanding of both government and the institutions responsible for protecting women. The institutions responsible for public safety and enforcing the rule of law must be equipped with the policies and resources needed to swiftly investigate offences and ensure that violent perpetrators are brought before the courts.
Laws influence behaviour partly because society believes they will be enforced. Every protection order that is taken seriously, every warning sign that prompts early intervention, every case that is properly investigated, and every offender that is prosecuted for a crime against a woman sends a message. Similarly, failure also sends a message, and too many perpetrators currently act with the confidence that their chances of being held to account are low.
So, while South Africa may have put the severity of this crisis into law by classifying GBVF as a national disaster, our criminal justice system must be empowered to match those words with action.
Firstly, that means treating GBVF cases differently from ordinary administrative workload.
Our country needs to strengthen the specialist investigative capacity for GBVF that already exists within SAPS, ensuring that experienced detectives have the resources, information, and institutional support needed to recognise patterns across station boundaries.
Information about previous assaults, protection orders, stalking, threats to kill, firearm access, and repeated police call-outs should consistently form part of an identifiable risk picture rather than remaining scattered across individual dockets and institutions.
Secondly, community policing structures should play a greater role. Police stations, community policing forums, shelters, healthcare workers, and other community structures often encounter different pieces of the same story. Better channels for bringing those signals together could help identify repeat offenders and women facing escalating danger much earlier.
Thirdly, the justice system must be capable of moving cases through court without years of drift. South Africa has already invested in specialist infrastructure. By December 2025, government reported that 79 of 92 Sexual Offences Court sites were operational, while further Domestic Violence Courts were being upgraded and the network of Thuthuzela Care Centres had expanded to 66. However, we should also examine dedicated GBVF court rolls or further specialist courts in areas carrying particularly heavy caseloads.
Additionally, specialist infrastructure can only be as effective as the people available to run it, and government itself has acknowledged staff shortages and capacity pressures within the courts. For example, constrained intermediary capacity resulted in the appointment of more than 100 ad hoc intermediaries nationally to help prevent cases from being postponed in the 2024/2025 year.
An urgent GBVF response necessitates the provision of sufficient prosecutors, investigators, intermediaries, and victim-support personnel to ensure that serious cases receive priority from complaint through to conclusion.
Lastly, women deserve more than our outrage after they die. They deserve institutions and communities that work relentlessly to keep them alive. If declaring GBVF a national disaster is to mean anything, our response must become far better at intervening before women are killed, and ensuring that those who commit violence against women no longer do so with confidence that they will escape consequence.
