Southern Africa's GBV Crisis: Laws Alone Cannot Stop the Killing

On a Thursday morning in Ekurhuleni, a sprawling municipality that rings Johannesburg, police discovered the body of Dineo M. The 38-year-old woman had been beaten and stabbed. She was found partially naked, left behind shrubs in a condition so severe that her own sister would later struggle to describe it without breaking. This was not an isolated incident. Over the preceding two months, a cluster of killings had claimed women in their twenties and thirties across the same area, each death adding weight to a crisis that South Africa had formally declared a national disaster just a year earlier.

For Dineo's sister Carol, the numbering and categorizing that follows such deaths—the statistics, the comparisons, the official language—misses something essential. She sat down to speak about what her family had lost, and the words came hard. Her sister would never walk through a door again. Dineo's two-year-old daughter would grow up without a mother, and Carol carried the impossible task of one day explaining to that child why. The brutality was not abstract. It was specific, personal, and it had left a small girl motherless.

Police and government officials moved carefully through their public statements. The Police Minister, Firoz Cachalia, said on Sunday that while investigators had found similarities among the killings and could not rule out a serial killer, no conclusive evidence yet pointed in that direction. An alert went out to women in Ekurhuleni advising them to take precautions. The government's Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Sindisiwe Chikunga, addressed a protest march in Johannesburg with a plea that carried the weight of desperation: stop raping women, stop insulting women, stop the financial abuse. She named the progression she had seen repeated—insults that escalate to assault, assault that ends in murder. "It cannot be," she said, as if saying it firmly enough might change what was already happening.

But activists and researchers who work on gender-based violence across the region had long since concluded that laws, however strong, were not enough. Naledi Masipa, campaigns manager at Gender Links, an organization promoting gender justice throughout Southern Africa, laid out the problem plainly: having laws and policies on the books does not automatically change what happens in the homes and streets where women live. The entire system has to function—reporting mechanisms, police response, health services, psychosocial support, legal assistance. If any part breaks down, women absorb the failure. The real measure, she said, is whether an ordinary woman in an ordinary community actually feels safer. Tegan Snyman, a researcher at Amnesty International South Africa, pointed out that femicide itself is not recognized as a distinct crime in the country's legal framework. It is treated as murder, undifferentiated from other killings. That erasure matters. It means the gendered nature of the violence—the fact that women are being killed because they are women—remains invisible in the law, and invisibility means fewer resources, less urgency, less focused attention.

The crisis extends beyond South Africa's borders. In Botswana, at least 37 percent of women have experienced violence in their lifetimes, according to Natasha Rampa, a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Youth and Gender Affairs. In June, Botswana and the United Nations launched a joint program aimed at prevention, survivor-centered services, and stronger institutions. The Minister of Youth and Gender Affairs, Lesego Chombo, told parliament that violence is unacceptable and that addressing it requires action beyond government alone. In Zambia, despite laws and national programs, gender-based violence persists. Anne Mbewe-Anamela, executive director of the Non-Governmental Coordinating Council, explained that the roots run deep: violence is embedded in power imbalances and social expectations. Communities often treat it as a private matter, a normal part of marriage. When survivors believe that, they stay silent. They remain trapped.

For activists across Southern Africa, the challenge is no longer about writing better laws. It is about making protection, support, and justice actually work—in police stations and hospitals, in courtrooms and communities, in the moments when a woman decides whether to report what has happened to her. For Carol, the work is more immediate and more painful. She wants Dineo's daughter to grow up knowing that what happened to her mother was not normal, that women deserve safety, that the world should have been different. That knowledge, for a child who will never know her mother, is both everything and not nearly enough.