Women Are Not Responsible for Men’s Violence

There is something deeply dispiriting about watching the same conversation happen over and over again.

Women are murdered, and the first response is to tell women how to protect themselves.

In the last few days, following the discovery of the bodies of women in and around Ekurhuleni, women have once again been warned to be vigilant. Police have advised women in affected areas to avoid walking or running alone and to take additional precautions while investigations continue. A multidisciplinary team has been established to investigate the killings. These measures are understandable in the face of an immediate threat, and people deserve to know when there is a danger in their community.

But there is something uncomfortable about how familiar this response feels.

Because South African women have been receiving safety instructions for most of our lives.

We know to share our live location or send a text message when we get home. We know which streets to avoid after dark, which parking spaces feel too isolated, which taxis feel safer, which friends we can call if something goes wrong. We know to keep our phones charged and our keys ready in our knuckles. We know to look behind us. We know to pretend to be on the phone when we're walking alone. We know that sometimes the safest thing to do is to make ourselves appear unavailable to the world around us.

This isn't paranoia. It is learned behaviour.

Women become fluent in the language of risk because the alternative can be frighteningly high-stakes.

And yet, when another woman is murdered, the same question is somehow being asked: what could women have done differently? And each time we hear these questions, it feels more infuriating than the last.

Could she have taken another route? Could she have exercised with someone else? Could she have stayed home? Could she have been more aware of her surroundings?

These questions may be asked with the intention of keeping women safe, but they also quietly shift the centre of the conversation. How have women become responsible for navigating this unwanted danger, rather than the society around them being responsible for confronting the violence itself?

Women cannot be expected to prevent violence against themselves by continually restricting the ways in which they live.

There is a point at which "be more cautious" stops being useful advice and starts becoming a description of the life women are expected to accept.

How careful are we supposed to be?

Careful enough not to run alone. Careful enough not to walk home. Careful enough not to drink too much. Careful enough not to trust the wrong person. Careful enough not to be somewhere at the wrong time. Careful enough to anticipate the behaviour of a stranger, a partner, a colleague, an acquaintance. Careful enough not to walk our dogs or do the grocery shopping?

Careful enough, somehow, to prevent someone else from deciding to hurt us.

That is an impossible responsibility.

And it is particularly frustrating because we already know that gender-based violence is not simply a collection of isolated incidents involving individual perpetrators. South Africa has spent years acknowledging GBVF as a national crisis. The state's own framework for addressing it recognises the need for prevention, accountability and changes to the social conditions that allow violence to persist. The Commission for Gender Equality has also emphasised that women have a right to participate equally and freely in public life without fear of violence.

So when women are murdered, the question cannot only be how women might have avoided those particular circumstances.

We have to ask what is being done to make those circumstances less dangerous in the first place.

And that means talking to and about men.

Not because every man is violent. Not because women are incapable of violence. And not because reducing GBV to "men are the problem" gets us anywhere particularly useful.

It means talking about men because the prevention of gender-based violence requires men to be participants in that prevention.

There is a strange passivity in the way we sometimes talk about this. GBV becomes something that happens to women, something women must learn to navigate, something women must teach their daughters about, something women must warn each other about.

But men have sons too.

Men have friends who make degrading jokes. They have colleagues who talk about women as though they are possessions. They know men who are controlling in relationships, men who don't accept rejection, men who think persistence is romantic when someone has already said no. They hear the conversations. They see the behaviour. They know the culture in which they are raising their sons.

What happens in those spaces matters.

If we are serious about prevention, then men have to be part of the conversation long before a woman is running down a dark road trying to get away from someone.

That means challenging entitlement. It means teaching boys that attraction does not create obligation, that rejection is not an insult, that intimacy is something two people create together rather than something one person takes from another. It means men being willing to confront the behaviour of other men, including when doing so is uncomfortable or socially inconvenient.

And it means institutions taking responsibility for the conditions in which violence occurs, rather than placing the burden of prevention almost entirely on the people most at risk of experiencing it.

This matters to us at Please because we spend our days talking about something that can seem, at first glance, entirely separate from this conversation: pleasure.

We talk about sex, desire, bodies, intimacy and exploration. We talk about men, women and every body getting to know themselves better and asking for what they enjoy. We talk about consent because pleasure without consent isn't pleasure. We talk about bodily autonomy because your body belongs to you.

But all of those conversations depend on something more fundamental.

Safety.

It is difficult to talk about women feeling free in their bodies when so many women are simultaneously being taught to regard their bodies as something that needs constant protection from other people.

There is a particular contradiction in telling women that they should feel confident, sexually liberated and at home in their bodies while also teaching them from childhood that those bodies are vulnerable to violence if they are in the wrong place, with the wrong person, at the wrong time.

We don't believe women should have to choose between freedom and safety.

And we don't believe the answer is to make women's lives smaller.

The goal cannot be a world in which women become so exceptionally good at assessing risk that we mistake their vigilance for safety. It cannot be a world where a woman successfully gets home and we call that a normal evening rather than recognising how much mental energy she has spent making sure she does.

Women should be able to run on our roads. We should be able to walk home. We should be able to go out alone. We should be able to drink, dance, flirt, have sex, change our minds, say no, say yes, say nothing at all. We should be able to occupy public space without having to calculate whether doing so makes us more vulnerable to violence.

None of this means that practical safety advice is unnecessary. It means that practical safety advice cannot be the entirety of our response.

We can tell women to be careful, but that cannot be the focus, and it certainly cannot be the solution.

We can tell women to look after one another. But we need to ask men to take a good, hard look at one another too.

We can acknowledge the immediate reality of the danger we are currently facing. But we can absolutely refuse to accept that danger as an inevitability for women and how they live.

Because women are not the safety plan here.

We are not responsible for becoming smaller, quieter, more vigilant or less visible in order to compensate for someone else's decision to cause harm.

The responsibility for ending gender-based violence does not sit with women. It sits with the men who perpetrate it, and with the institutions and systems responsible for preventing violence and holding perpetrators accountable, before another woman becomes another warning, another headline, another name we are told to remember.

We want more for women than survival.

We want women to be able to move through the world with the same ordinary expectation of safety that should belong to everyone.

And that should not be a radical demand.

It should be the bare minimum.

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If you’re wondering what you can do right now, support the women and organisations already doing this work.

Show up to marches and protests when you can, follow and amplify organisations like Women For Change, donate to organisations providing direct support like POWA, or support the National Shelter Movement of South Africa, which connects and supports shelters for women and children affected by GBV.

Share campaigns, sign petitions, go purple, donate if you can, and keep showing up.

There are many ways to help, and our anger should not have to disappear when the headlines do.