Our Silence Is Policy: Five Women Killed in 96 Hours

GOOD Statement by Suzette Little, GOOD Deputy Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Councillor:

In just four days, five women were brutally murdered in Cape Town. These are not isolated tragedies; they are part of a relentless pattern of violence that has become woven into the fabric of our society. South Africa has one of the world’s highest femicide rates, estimated at more than five times the global average. In 2023, an average of eleven women were murdered every single day.

Among the victims of the past week (Thursday to Sunday) were:

• A 22-year-old woman was raped and killed in the BBM Section in Khayelitsha, her body found face down near communal toilets;
• An 18-year-old girl was shot dead in Delft in an alleged extortion-related case;
• A woman was murdered during a home invasion on Echo Road, Fish Hoek;
• And two sisters were killed in Mitchells Plain, allegedly by their own brother, who has since been arrested.

Each death is a story cut short, a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, gone forever. And yet, we move on as if this brutality is inevitable. Where are the law enforcement agencies when these crimes occur? Criminals roam freely, guns are everywhere, and fear has become a permanent resident in our neighbourhoods.

The statistics are no longer numbers on a page; they are a scream that echoes through our streets, a silent panic in the eyes of women and vulnerable groups across our city. We speak of them at vigils, we see them in headlines, yet we treat them as an unavoidable plague, a tragic but unstoppable force of nature. This is a lie. The disturbing and unchecked rate of gender-based violence in our city is not a force of nature; it is the direct result of a catastrophic failure of governance.

We have fundamentally misunderstood the meaning of safety. The City’s mandate includes Social Development, Community Development, and Safety and Security, but when it comes to gender-based violence, we have abandoned the first two and hidden behind a weakened version of the third. We react to GBV with ambulances and police vans at the bottom of the cliff while systematically defunding every fence we could have built at the top.

Where are the fully-funded, accessible safe houses that turn no one away? Where are the robust psycho-social support programmes in every community, the trauma counselling for children who witness violence, the economic empowerment initiatives that allow women to escape abusive partners? These are the pillars of true social safety, and they are crumbling.

Instead, we offer a police-centred response. More patrols, faster reaction times, and harsher sentences, all of which are necessary but fundamentally reactive. Policing intervenes after the harm has been done; it cannot heal trauma, restore families, or prevent the next act of violence. By focusing almost exclusively on enforcement, we have given up on prevention altogether.

And through it all, the blame is deftly shifted. We blame a “broken society,” “toxic culture,” or the “justice system.” We point fingers everywhere but at our own budgets, our policies, and our priorities. We blame the disease for its symptoms while refusing to administer the cure.

The truth is this: a city that does not invest in dismantling the structures of gender-based violence is a city that condones it. Our inaction is a policy. Our silence is complicity. Every rand cut from a youth programme that teaches boys healthy masculinity is a rand added to the future cost of policing. Every shelter we fail to build is a woman we condemn to a life of terror. We are not only failing to protect our citizens; we are building a city architecturally designed for violence against women.

The restoration we need is not from our past, but from our present apathy. It demands a budget that reflects the urgency of this crisis. It means funding prevention as aggressively as we fund reaction. It means listening to the frontline organisations that already hold the solutions but lack the resources.

Our women and children deserve more than our thoughts, prayers, and empty promises. They deserve a city that fights for their safety with every tool at its disposal, not only with handcuffs, but with hope, investment, and an unbreakable commitment to life.

GOOD Manifesto on Youth Leadership: Promoting youth leadership within the party and communities.

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