According to the latest SAPS crime statistics for Q3 2024/25 (1 October–31 December 2024), women in South Africa experienced: 961 murders – that’s 11 women killed every day 11,803 rapes – more than 131 per day, or 5 every hour 16,023 cases of assault GBH – 45 women seriously assaulted every day.

And these are only the reported cases. Thousands more remain invisible—buried in silence, fear, or distrust of a system that too often fails them.

By comparison, terrorism kills around 1,667 people per month globally. South African women alone face nearly 12,000 violent attacks every month—yet we see no comparable public outrage or mobilisation. If foreign terrorists murdered and raped women at this scale, there would be a national shutdown. Troops in the streets. Special task teams. A presidential address. Instead, we get press conferences and broken promises.

Yes, South Africa does have Sexual Offences Courts—originally reintroduced in 2013 to offer a more supportive environment for survivors. But: There are just over 100 courts for the entire country—far below what’s needed. Many are under-resourced, inconsistently staffed, or not fully operational SOC’s are not backed by permanent legislation, which limits their stability and expansion. Rural and high-crime areas often have no access to these specialised courts at all

In short: the idea exists—but the implementation is too limited, too slow, and too fragile. Forensic backlogs are growing. Cases drag on for years. Survivors face retraumatisation in court. And far too many perpetrators go free. South African women are terrorised daily—with little hope of justice. We cannot continue to describe this crisis with soft language. It is time to act.

Action Society is calling for:

Violence against women to be declared a national disaster.
Urgent investment in Public-Private Partnerships to strengthen investigative and forensic capacity
The expansion and permanent legislation of Sexual Offences Courts—ensuring access in every district
Better-trained prosecutors and magistrates to prioritise gender-based violence Enforcement of mandatory minimum sentences and the closure of legal loopholes
This is not a women’s issue. It’s a national emergency. Raise your voice. Share this message. Demand accountability. Contribute to Action Society to support our campaign for safety, justice, and reform. Because silence protects the predator—not the victim.

Juanita du Preez is Action Society Spokesperson

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As South Africa marks the annual 16 Days of Activism campaign, the President’s newsletter underscores the scale of the crisis and outlines government’s intensified response after officially declaring GBVF a national disaster last month.

“As South Africa and the world observes 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence from 25 November to 10 December, it is a shame that our country has the dubious distinction of having one of the world’s highest levels of violence against women and girls,” the President said.

According to data from the HSRC’s National GBV Study (2022), more than 35% of women over 18 have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, with most cases committed by intimate partners. The report, he said, provides the baseline needed to drive the country’s long-term response to GBVF through the National Strategic Plan adopted after the 2018 Presidential Summit.

Reflecting on the long-term effects of gender-based violence, President Ramaphosa said the impact is “arguably even more corrosive” than the devastation caused by COVID-19.

“Gender-based violence destroys families, has an economic cost, causes instability and fear for women and girls, and reproduces inter-generational trauma,” he wrote.

He said classifying GBVF as a national disaster strengthens the mandates of key departments, including Police, Justice, Social Development, Health and Basic Education, to scale up survivor support, expand shelters and safe spaces, and fast-track emergency resource allocation.

All organs of state are now required to submit progress reports to the National Disaster Management Centre.

The President highlighted recent briefings to Parliament’s Multiparty Women’s Caucus, where the SAPS and the Department of Justice reported steps taken to improve case management and strengthen the criminal justice system’s response to GBVF.

These include:

Expansion of victim-friendly facilities and specialised GBV desks at police stations
Establishment of a GBVF Information Centre at SAPS Academy Pretoria
Faster evidence processing and improved collaboration between SAPS and the NPA
A new 24-hour service for obtaining protection orders
Progress on anti-GBV legislation signed into law in 2022, including stronger sexual offences registers and more specialised courts
Despite this, President Ramaphosa acknowledged that implementation of the National Strategic Plan has been “uneven”, saying the disaster classification would help speed up funding flows for survivor services and improve access to justice.

Men are central to the solution

President Ramaphosa again emphasised that men must play a leading role in prevention efforts, echoing remarks he made during the Men’s Indaba in the Free State last week.

“Unless we directly engage men, we will continue to have marches, hold protests and conduct social media campaigns, but the statistics will not change. Even as men are the main perpetrators of GBVF, they are also part of the solution,” he said.

The President called for a nationwide, sustained programme of dialogues with men and boys to confront the drivers of violence including toxic masculinity, harmful cultural norms, peer pressure and socialisation.

President Ramaphosa further stressed that combating GBVF requires a whole-of-society response.

“A national disaster demands national responsibility. Whether as communities, civil society, government, faith leaders, business, unions or citizens, we must all play our part,” he said.

He urged South Africans to report abuse rather than “look away”, and to actively dismantle the attitudes that enable violence.

“The safety and security of women and children is everybody’s business. Let us continue to work together to realise a society free from gender-based violence and femicide,” President Ramaphosa said.

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Pregnancy can trigger or worsen violence in relationships, often due to changes in power dynamics, financial stress, or a partner’s perceived loss of control.

A longitudinal study in Durban, a South African coastal city, found that 20% of women had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual or psychological intimate partner violence during pregnancy. Another study in Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic capital, found 36.6% of young women reported violence by a partner or spouse, and pregnancy was cited as a key risk period for violence.

Children are directly and indirectly affected by this violence against women. They also experience violence across a range of settings, including their homes, schools and communities. The Birth to Thirty study, a research programme tracking the lives of a group of people in the South African township of Soweto, found that 99% of the cohort had been exposed to at least one type of violence. And 40% had been exposed to five or six other types of violence.

The 18th issue of the South African Child Gauge, a research report launched in November 2025, focuses on the intersections of violence against women and children. These forms of violence occur together in the same households and share the same risk factors. However, they historically have been treated as separate issues, with services housed in different government departments.

This article offers an opportunity to shift the focus from awareness raising to action-oriented thinking that can break the cycle of violence. These reflections come from our chapter in the Child Gauge, which was co-written with Aislinn Delany, an independent social researcher.

In this article, we highlight three approaches that can guide South Africa’s efforts to prevent violence against women and children:

starting early

working across sectors, with the Department of Health playing a critical role

transforming harmful gender norms.

Breaking the cycle of violence

The first 1,000 days (from conception to 2 years old) are a critical development phase that shapes a child’s future health, learning and wellbeing.

Exposure to ongoing violence is especially damaging during the early years. Excessive physical and psychological stress or trauma, also known as toxic stress, can disrupt the development of the brain. This may result in lifelong consequences for children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development.

Studies have shown that children exposed to violence in the home are more likely to normalise violence as a method of conflict resolution. This keeps the cycle of violence going from one generation to the next. It puts boys at higher risk of being violent to their partners as men. It makes girls more vulnerable to victimisation by intimate partners later in life.

Preventing violence against women and children should therefore begin early and continue. Early action can address the root causes and risk factors, interrupting the cycle within an individual’s lifetime and across generations.

The health sector’s role

Violence against women and children is a complex and deeply rooted problem. It requires a coordinated response from a range of sectors, including health, education, justice and social services.

Within this ecosystem of support, maternal and child health services offer one of the most frequent points of contact with pregnant women, young children and their families. These routine contacts provide opportunities to identify women and children at risk and connect families with support services.

It is therefore essential to strengthen the focus on violence prevention during the first 1,000 days through the direct actions of health workers or by using health facilities as platforms for delivery. For example, training health workers not only to screen for substance use, mental health concerns and exposure to violence, but also to provide care that recognises how violence and adversity affect health and behaviour.

Screening must also be linked to clear and reliable referral pathways to services.

The Road to Health Book (the South African child health record given to children at birth) offers another opportunity to strengthen screening and support.

Early opportunities to challenge harmful gender norms

Violence is a learned behaviour, shaped by social norms. Where violence is accepted or justified as a way of resolving conflict, it becomes part of everyday life. Transforming harmful norms is therefore essential to building safer homes and communities.

Some programmes have shown positive results in shifting attitudes and behaviours and reducing violence against women and children. The Bandebereho and RealFathers studies are examples from low-resource settings in sub-Saharan Africa. They are designed to engage men as fathers and have been shown to reduce intimate partner violence and violent discipline of children by engaging men as caregivers.

The beliefs that caregiving is only a woman’s role, and that women should endure violence to preserve family unity, are harmful. By addressing harmful beliefs, these programmes can foster shared caregiving, positive discipline and joint decision-making.

Evidence also suggests that men’s involvement during pregnancy and early childhood can strengthen family relationships and improve maternal and child well-being. Research in Soweto, South Africa found that when fathers attended pregnancy ultrasound scans, they reported stronger emotional bonds with their partners. And they felt a greater sense of responsibility and care for their unborn child.

Similarly, another analysis found that postnatal father involvement was associated with lower rates of maternal depression. These findings underscore the importance of designing gender transformative interventions. Practically, this may mean creating family-friendly health environments, with flexible clinic hours, and programmes that prepare men and families for nurturing and responsive care.

Conclusion

Without intervention, violence against women and children is likely to increase in frequency and severity.

Early intervention is therefore crucial. Violence prevention should ideally be integrated into existing systems at scale rather than treated as additional services. In this, the health sector plays a central role, particularly during the first 1,000 days, given its routine contact with mothers, infants and caregivers.

It is equally important to transform the harmful gender norms that sustain violence and limit men’s participation in caregiving.

Written by Phiwe Babalo Nota, Researcher, Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town, and Wiedaad Slemming, Director, Children’s Insitute, University of Cape Town.

Aislinn Delany was a coauthor of the chapter on violence prevention within the first 1,000 days in the South African Child Gauge 2025 on which this article is based.

Republished with permission from The Conversation. The original article can be found here.

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“I may not be able to answer the question of whether we are progressing or regressing, but I do know that we are at a very low end in terms of brokenness in the dignity or indignity with which women and children are being treated in this country at this moment. It has gone way beyond a question of criminality and crime,” Deputy Chairperson of the National Planning Commission (NPC), Professor Tinyiko Maluleke, told SAnews, during a recent interview.

As an independent advisory body appointed by the President, the NPC is tasked with advising government and Parliament on matters pertaining to the implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP) Vision 2030.

The Deputy Chairperson said the country has come to a point where one cannot merely say that the police must do their work.

“Of course, the police must do their job. When young mothers are getting involved in the abuse of their own children and fathers are getting involved in the abuse of their own children at the scale at which we are witnessing in this country, there is something much more deeper that is broken. We speak of social cohesion and maybe this is a devastating illustration of the lack of it,” he told SAnews.

Expanding on whether the country has made progress in tackling women’s issues, Maluleke said this was a mixed bag, adding that the establishment of a Ministry of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities (DWYPD) as well as a good number of women in Parliament, were good signs.

He also welcomed the fact that the country has the Gender-Based Violence and Femicide National Strategic Plan (GBVF-NSP) which sets out to provide a cohesive strategic framework to guide the national response to gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF).

“But we are currently confronted with a very worrying situation in which South African society seems to be turning against women. There’s almost a low-intensity war against women. If you look at the numbers of women who are victims of rape and violence, the numbers are simply mind-boggling as to what actually is happening in our country.”

At the release of the fourth quarterly crime statistics for the period 1 January – 31 March 2025, the South African Police Service (SAPS) said that rape cases had increased with Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal contributing 19.1% and 19.9% respectively to the national total.

However, decreases in rape statistics were recorded in the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Limpopo, North West, and the Western Cape.

This as the police acknowledged that gender-based violence and femicide affects all genders, adding that women remain disproportionately affected by rape, assault GBH, and murder

Additionally, a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) study conducted in 2024 revealed that one in three women in South Africa have experienced physical intimate partner violence in their lifetime. According to the report, between July and September 2024, 957 women were murdered, 1 567 survived attempted murders, and 14 366 were assaulted, resulting in grievous bodily harm. In addition, 10 191 cases of rape were reported during this period.

Maluleke also bemoaned the fact that “we have also become a society that is turning or eating its own children if you like, because children are being sold, raped, killed at very high and abnormal rates.”

“There is something broken in our society when it comes to the relationship between men and women; between society and children; men and children; women and children, because some of the cases indicate that.”

In his reflections of Women’s Month, Maluleke said that in South Africa, the face of unemployment and poverty tends to be that of a woman – adding that the elimination of poverty, inequality and employment are the key objectives of the NDP.

“The NDP is not very vocal or very explicit on gender issues in general. It’s not very explicit but to the extent that the NDP is about the elimination of inequality, the ending of poverty and unemployment, it is, at least conscious of the people who are the faces of these problems.”

The commission is the custodian of the NDP.

“The face[s] of unemployment, the face[s] of poverty in this country are women. To that extent, there is an acknowledgement of the problems that affect women but perhaps not enough explicit reference to the broader gender issues that we have come to understand and appreciate very well now. [This] includes violence against women, issues of unequal pay and work that is not regarded as work and therefore unpaid work which tends to be done by women.”

As the country celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first official National Women’s Day on 09 August 2025, Maluleke said it is regrettable that the NDP did not anticipate the levels of violence against women.

“The levels of violence against women have exploded in our faces over the past decade or so and it is indeed regrettable that the NDP could not anticipate this problem to the extent that it has come.

“But I think it is a problem that has since been acknowledged by government and by society at large. There are plans and strategies that have since been developed and that has never been our problem as a country. We don’t lack plans and strategies. We just don’t implement as comprehensibly [and] as constantly as possible,” he explained.

Greater emphasis on women

On whether the NDP of the future will place greater emphasis on women’s issues, he said the existence of the DWYPD is a “massive acknowledgement” and attempt to address the problem.

“The current NDP expires in 2030, and plans are already afoot, certainly conversations have started within the National Planning Commission, about the next plan beyond 2030. I cannot imagine a plan beyond 2030 that does not foreground and not merely include but actually foreground issues such as violence against women and all the issues of inequality between men and women in society that we have come to appreciate so well,” he explained.

He said issues of gender have become as important as issues of race which were perhaps much more foregrounded in the period of the birth of the new democracy.

This as in June, the Commission said it was conducting feminist-led gender-mainstreaming workshops, in search of comprehensive responses to the current fate and state of women and youth.

The workshops were revealing a people “anxious and very concerned with the levels of violence and the continued non-representation of women’s voices at all the levels.”

“Sometimes you have the numbers of women but usually they don’t have roles that are influential or that can change the direction of the country. The question of representativity has now gone beyond numbers. I spoke about the number of women in Parliament but that in itself is not enough. We are beginning to hear voices that are speaking out against the cliché and superficial nature of just numbers. Those are just some of the voices we are hearing.

“We are also realising that class has also become a very important matter in the country. Class in general but also class among and between women is also an issue that needs attention.

“It doesn’t help to have one class of women attempting to represent all classes of women. The same goes for other groups in society. So, intersectionality, inclusion, all of these issues have become much more paramount, and people are beginning to be rather rigorous in discussing them because they want to move beyond the numbers game.”

Asked about the status of women living with disabilities, Maluleke said they are among the most vulnerable in society in terms of inclusivity.

“Certainly, there is room in critical national processes to be more inclusive but also in ordinary day to day engagements and activities.”

Asked what his message to women this month would be, he said: “My message is for the sake of women who marched in 1956. We owe it to them not to give up, but also, we owe it to them to have policies and structures that affirm the dignity of women in this country and their role.

“The message to the women themselves is one of saying thank you. Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for your largely uncelebrated, unremarked but crucial role for the coherence of our society, but also for the economy of this country.
“Women are the backbone of the economy of this country because of the work they do, most of which is not recognised as such. Thank you to the women of the country,” he said.

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