Confronting our innate perceptions to tackle gender-based violence

Three in five women experience verbal, physical, and/or sexual abuse in their lifetime

- Natasha Mboyisa

Black power: Women throughout the country - including some men - took to the streets in a lie-down protest against femicide and gender-based violence, which took place last Friday. They were dressed in black, and bursts of purple.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a national heart condition, it is not always the most visible crisis, but one that can stop a country's moral pulse in an instant.

No amount of economic recovery plans, social investment and development summits, or electoral and political promises will help if the soul and heart of a nation stop beating for its women and girls, if women and girls cannot live, work, and dream safely.

South Africa has been showing symptoms of this cardiac failure for years. The sharp pains come daily in headlines announcing yet another woman's murder whose name is turned into a hashtag; the national calmness that follows each tragedy, and the faintness that follows when we realise that despite all the talk, nothing truly changes.

Gender-based violence has become South Africa's most relentless epidemic and the numbers reveal the magnitude of this reality. Three in five women experience verbal, physical, and/or sexual abuse in their lifetime. Research from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) indicated that over 35% of women who participated in the first South African National Gender-Based Violence Study (2022) had endured physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, while one in five reported having been sexually abused.

The South African Police Service (SAPS) crime statistics for the first quarter of 2025 tell an equally harrowing story: 13,453 sexual offences were recorded between January and March, including 10,688 cases of rape, 1,872 sexual assaults, 656 attempted sexual offences, and 236 contact sexual offences (May25_Release.pdf).