South Africa’s gender-based violence crisis is a test of national leadership.
The first national GBV survey found that one in three women aged 18 or older had experienced physical violence in their lifetime. In the final three months of 2024 alone, more than 11,800 rapes were recorded — about 128 a day — according to the GBVF Response Fund’s 2024/25 annual report.
These figures are horrifying, but statistics must not replace action. South Africa now sits at 13 women’s bodies found in Gauteng, 19 in KwaZulu-Natal, and several others nationally.
The crisis persists because warnings are ignored, institutions fail to coordinate, and accountability dissolves after each statement of outrage.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s September 29 address must be judged against this record of ignored warnings and dissolved accountability. The address exposed the exhausted ritual through which government now performs concern without accepting culpability.
After seven years of acknowledged failure, another review of stalled cases, another deadline on forensic backlogs and another round of municipal safety audits cannot be presented as leadership. These are basic duties the state should already have discharged.
The address named no office-bearer responsible for past failure, offered no credible enforcement mechanism, and did not explain what consequences would follow when the new directives were ignored. By leaving institutional responsibility undefined, it shifted attention from the state’s obligations to the moral conduct of individual citizens.
That displacement was most evident in the appeal to “good men”, which shifted the centre of gravity from state accountability to private morality, as though femicide persists because decent citizens have not spoken loudly enough rather than because institutions repeatedly abandon women.
The appeal thus became compassion as political theatre: solemn words masking a government still reluctant to attach names, budgets, deadlines and sanctions to its promises. Leadership begins where sympathy ends — with responsibility that can be measured and failure that carries consequences.
The cost of that displacement is clearest in the warnings that precede femicide. Coercion, threats and abuse often escalate before violence becomes fatal, and victims may alert relatives, friends or the police. These are opportunities for public institutions to intervene. When they do not trigger protection, investigation and consequences, it is a failure to turn knowledge into coordinated state action.
Closing that gap between warning and intervention makes effective policing indispensable, but policing cannot rest on slogans or periodic operations.
The institutions that protect such masks are further weakened by a political economy that leaves many young people outside work, property, productive networks and meaningful recognition. Exclusion does not mechanically produce GBV, but it creates fertile ground for wounded masculinity and the desire to recover power through domination.
A victim-centred police service must respond promptly, recognise escalating abuse, protect survivors and investigate thoroughly. Prosecutors, courts, health services and communities must form an unbroken chain of responsibility in which no warning, docket or protection request disappears.
Constitutional policing and decisive policing are not opposites: due process protects legitimacy, while institutional passivity protects perpetrators.
But even an unbroken criminal justice chain addresses violence only after social permission for it has taken root. Policing alone cannot repair a society in which violence against women is concealed, excused or normalised.
When public authority evades responsibility, private domination gains social permission. GBV is therefore more than criminality: it is an intimate expression of civic disintegration, the collapse of restraint, reciprocity and respect for the equal personhood of others.
That civic breakdown does not stop at the household door. Political assassinations, intimidation and the maiming of civilians reveal in public life the same disorder that coercion, assault and femicide reveal in private life. Both flourish when power is detached from service and accountability. An elite that treats office as an enterprise of accumulation teaches society that authority is an entitlement to possess, command and punish. Domination then travels easily from the state and the party into the household.
Yet domination survives not only through open force; it also survives through disguise. Perpetrators rarely present themselves truthfully. Many wear masks of compassion, speaking the language of love, protection, provision, religious virtue or political service to secure trust and silence. In public they appear attentive and generous; in private care becomes surveillance, protection becomes possession and generosity becomes indebtedness.
Families, congregations, parties and workplaces then defend reputation over testimony. Leadership fails when it protects the mask rather than the person harmed behind it.
The institutions that protect such masks are further weakened by a political economy that leaves many young people outside work, property, productive networks and meaningful recognition. Exclusion does not mechanically produce GBV, but it creates fertile ground for wounded masculinity and the desire to recover power through domination. Where youth organisations are hollowed out, schools fail to lead to livelihoods, and party branches become factional machines, anger becomes politically homeless. It can become democratic and transformative — or criminal, xenophobic, militarised and patriarchal.
That is why the argument must move from anger in the abstract to the local institutions that can give it democratic form. Municipalities shape public lighting, transport nodes, shelters, clinics, community safety forums and the public spaces in which women must move without fear. They are also closest to contracts, housing lists, jobs and ward influence. When a council seat or tender becomes the nearest available economy, violent political competition and women’s everyday insecurity draw sustenance from the same institutional decay.
The coming local elections must therefore test whether parties and coalitions can govern, whether protest can become accountability and whether candidates have credible plans to make communities safer for women.
These elections will ultimately test whether democratic institutions can give legitimate anger an ethical and constructive architecture. A republic serious about GBV must do more than pacify youth or urge constitutional patience. It must organise people into work, service, learning, local reconstruction and democratic authorship, while directly challenging the patriarchal norms that turn frustration into violence against women.
More than an awareness campaign, prevention is the daily work of rebuilding institutions, opportunity and ethical citizenship. That work, however, will remain rhetoric unless authority is tied to clear responsibility.
This is the leadership for which the GBV crisis is searching: authority made answerable through named duties and enforceable consequences. A station commander must answer for a neglected complaint, an investigator for a mishandled docket, a prosecutor for avoidable delay, a minister for inadequate capacity and a mayor for unsafe public spaces and broken referral systems.
Parties, workplaces, congregations and communities must likewise refuse to shelter perpetrators behind status or staged compassion. South Africa does not lack declarations against GBV; it lacks leaders willing to make responsibility visible and failure consequential. Until that changes, masked perpetrators will keep occupying the space where moral authority should stand.
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