In 2017, South Africa was reportedly losing eight women a day to violence. That number was already unbearable. Today, the figure has risen to at least fifteen. In a single generation, the crisis has doubled. Femicide is not creeping. It is accelerating. And with more than 5 500 women killed between April 2023 and March 2024 alone, the scale of harm is now so vast that it is almost impossible to grasp through numbers alone.
But numbers matter. They force us to confront what we have tried to avoid. When fifteen women die each day, it would take only fourteen days to empty Parliament of all its women representatives. If that image does not alarm us into action, then nothing will.
In 2017, I led the CSVR study, ‘Violence Against Women in South Africa: A Country in Crisis’, a piece of work that confirmed what many of us already knew, but the state was still unwilling to admit. The evidence was clear. The violence was structural, widespread and escalating. We used the word ‘crisis’ deliberately, because that is what the data showed.
Yet when we launched the study, the response from parts of government was defensive. I will never forget the public confrontation with the then Minister of Women in the Presidency, Susan Shabangu, who insisted that calling GBV a crisis was irresponsible. Her comments, later reported in TimesLIVE (https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-08-30-susan-shabangu-says-violence-against-women-not-a-crisis/#google_vignette), reflected a deeper institutional reluctance to acknowledge the truth. Behind closed doors, officials urged us to remove the word ‘crisis’ altogether because it could ‘create panic’ and ‘suggest a national disaster.’ They feared the perception. We feared the reality.
The irony is impossible to ignore today. Everything the state resisted naming in 2017 is now unfolding in real time. Femicide is soaring. Reporting systems are overwhelmed. Survivors are sidelined by a slow and uneven justice process. And instead of coordinated action, we still face fragmented efforts, delayed implementation and political hesitation.
It was this refusal to confront reality that helped spark the #TotalShutdown movement in 2018. Women, LGBTQI+ persons, workers, students and activists demanded that government treat GBVF as a national priority.
The Presidential Summit on GBVF in November 2018 felt like a breakthrough. For the first time, the highest office in the country openly acknowledged the depth of the emergency. When the National Strategic Plan on GBVF was launched, many of us felt a sense of cautious hope. We believed the years of advocacy were finally bearing fruit.
We celebrated too soon.
Seven years later, coordination remains uneven. The National Council on GBVF, promised repeatedly, is still not fully operational. The long-awaited GBVF Fund, announced with fanfare, is struggling with governance and delivery. Dedicated funding for prevention and survivor support remains inconsistent. Legislative reforms have progressed, but implementation is slow. Women and LGBTQI+ persons continue to face harm at home, in workplaces, in taxis, in communities, in schools and across university campuses.
And the femicide rate continues to rise.
The gap between policy and lived reality has become a chasm. Families who lost daughters, partners and mothers cannot fill that gap with policy documents. Survivors who navigate broken criminal justice processes cannot fill it with slogans. Communities living under daily fear cannot fill it with annual speeches.
The problem is not lack of knowledge. It is lack of coordinated leadership, sustained investment and political will.
Other countries have faced their crises honestly. When in 2021, Puerto Rico recorded one woman killed by gender-based violence every week, it declared a state of emergency. They recognised that a society bleeding at that rate could not afford normal politics. They walked toward the crisis not away from it. They treated the problem as it was, not as they hoped it might be.
South Africa has not done the same. We are living through a worse crisis than Puerto Rico did, yet we respond as though we have time. We don’t.
If the Durban floods taught us anything, it is what a real disaster response looks like: urgency, coordination, leadership and resources directed at the epicentre of harm. When Umlazi was underwater, support was immediate and concentrated. Why? Because disaster demands presence, not denial.
GBVF deserves the same level of national intervention.
Instead, we behave as though slow progress is acceptable. But nothing about fifteen women killed each day is acceptable. Nothing about more than a hundred rape reports daily is acceptable. When you ignore an elephant long enough, it does not shrink. It sits on your chest until you can no longer breathe.
We need to treat GBVF exactly as we would treat a flood, wildfire or pandemic: with national urgency, clear coordination and sustained investment.
And we must invest in the spaces where long-term change is shaped. Schools and universities hold untapped potential in this fight. If you shift norms in a primary school, you see results in fifteen years. If you transform cultures in universities, you shift an entire generation. These environments are where prevention becomes culture, where accountability becomes expectation, where young people learn what is acceptable and what is not. Universities mirror society. And right now, the mirror shows danger.
Working in the academic sector has shown me how deep the crisis runs. I see the same patterns of fear, silence and harm that exist everywhere else. Students who arrive with hope often leave with trauma. Reporting systems are stretched. Prevention work competes with limited resources. And yet universities are also laboratories for change. They generate the evidence, shape the discourse and mould the leaders who will influence the next decades of this country.
This is why institutional voices matter. This is why the Women for Change call matters. And this is why declaring GBVF a national disaster is not an overreaction. It is the only proportionate response to the level of harm we are experiencing.
We once feared the word ‘crisis.’ Today, we live inside it.
If thousands of women are being murdered every year, if more than a hundred report rape daily, if survivors navigate broken systems, and if the crisis continues to deepen despite national plans and summits, then what exactly are we waiting for?
How many more lives must be stolen before we call this what it is?
I have spent years in this work, as a researcher, activist, policy advocate and now within the university sector. I have watched warning signs dismissed. I have seen survivors carry the cost of political delay. I have witnessed families shattered by preventable violence.
And I am still here because I believe South Africa can choose a different path. But we cannot choose it while pretending things are under control.
The Women for Change call for a national disaster declaration is not extreme. It is overdue. It is rational. It is necessary. And it is the only honest response left.
We do not need more shock. We need action. We do not need more awareness. We need accountability. We do not need more policy. We need implementation.
If Puerto Rico could name its truth at one femicide a week, South Africa can name its truth at fifteen a day.
The Women for Change call is not a radical demand. It is the most reasonable one we have left.
The time for denial is over.
The time for decisive national action is now.
About the author: Nonhlanhla Sibanda is a researcher and feminist activist with over a decade of experience in the GBV sector. She was the lead researcher on the 2017 CSVR study ‘Violence Against Women in South Africa: A Country in Crisis’ (available at https://www.csvr.org.za/pdf/CSVR-Violence-Against-Women-in-SA.pdf). Her work spans national advocacy, policy engagement and institutional change aimed at ending gender-based violence and femicide.