We Can’t Out-Careful Our Way Out of This

Nine women. That’s the number as it stands right now: bodies found around Kempton Park and Ekurhuleni since July, most of them naked or half-dressed, most of them with bruising, one of them a runner who went out for what should have been an ordinary morning and never came home. And it isn’t only grown women. This week, a ten-year-old girl, Octavia Swart, was found dead in a dam in Kraaifontein, not far from where I live, and a fourteen-year-old boy has been arrested. Ten years old. I keep sitting with that number because there is no way to make sense of it, and I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to.

The police have warned women in the Kempton Park area not to walk or run alone. President Ramaphosa has said no stone will be left unturned. There’s a task team, a reward, and a serial killer theory nobody will confirm yet. And somewhere in the middle of all that language, actual women and actual children are gone, and their families are the ones left to make sense of a sentence like “no stone will be left unturned.”

I’ve watched this unfold on my feed the way I imagine most South African women have, with that particular mix of horror and a horrible sort of recognition, because we’ve seen this story before and we’ll see it again, and yet something about this one has tipped the whole country over. Maybe it’s the number. Maybe it’s that these were women and a child just living their lives, walking, running, going about a Tuesday, and it wasn’t enough to keep them safe. There are marches planned over the next few months, and my feed is full of women saying the same thing in a hundred different ways: we have had enough.

Because here’s what nobody outside of being a woman in this country really understands, and I include myself in “understands” only because I live it now, not because anyone ever explained it to me. It’s the low hum of calculation that runs under everything I do. Pulling out of my driveway, I’m checking who’s around. I think twice about leaving the sliding door open on a hot day. Walking to my car in a parking lot, I’ve already worked out where I’d run if I had to. Stopped at a robot, I’m watching the car windows and the pavement. Who’s approaching from where? Even taking the dog for a walk in broad daylight, even standing in a mall, there’s a part of my brain that never fully switches off. We’ve effectively been told by our own government, in so many words, not to live like normal people. Don’t walk alone. Don’t run alone. Don’t get murdered. As if avoiding it is a matter of being careful enough, as if the women who didn’t come home just weren’t careful enough, which is such an obscene thing to even have to say out loud.

I have three children, two daughters and a son, and if I’m honest, my son gets more freedom than either of them, not because I trust him more, but because I already know what’s waiting for a girl in this world that isn’t waiting for him the same way.

I lived through abuse myself, both the kind that leaves marks and the kind that doesn’t, and for a long time I never once called it gender-based violence, because nobody ever gave me the language for it. It was made small. It was the sort of thing that got smoothed over, something that happened, something you didn’t really talk about because talking about it made you the difficult one. So when I see women finding the words for what happened to them, and finding each other, and refusing to let it be made small anymore, I am glad of it in a way I can’t fully explain, even while I wish none of us had needed to learn this the hard way.

And I’ll say the part that’s harder to say kindly. I don’t think there’s much point left in talking to men about this, not in the sense of asking them nicely to stop, because it is always women and girls on the other end of it – rape, murder, abuse – always us, and polite conversation has not moved the needle in any of our lifetimes. Something more serious has to happen in how this country prosecutes these cases, in how easily men convicted of violence against women end up back on the street, and in what actually counts as a consequence in this country. People are furious enough right now that you’ll hear the words “bring back the death penalty” everywhere from Facebook comments to radio call-ins, and I understand exactly where that fury comes from; I feel it myself some days. But if I’m honest about what would actually change things, it’s less about the harshest possible sentence and more about the fact that so many of these cases never even get that far, that convictions are rare, that men walk free on technicalities or thin evidence or an overwhelmed system, long before anyone gets to argue about what the punishment should be.

And it isn’t just that the system fails to convict. A year after this was declared a national disaster, the government’s own murder statistics for women don’t even agree with each other. What we do know is that 569 women were murdered in South Africa between April and June this year alone. And those are only the recorded cases; less than one in five women who experience violence ever report it at all. That’s the fight, as far as I can see it. And yes, it starts even earlier than the courtroom, with how we raise our sons, what we teach them about women, about anger, about entitlement, because none of this happens in a vacuum.

I don’t have a neat way to close this out, and I’m not going to pretend I do. What I know is that there are marches and gatherings happening over the coming weeks, and I’ll be at one. If you want something with real momentum behind it, there’s the Deep South Walk/Run For Women on 27 September, walking from Glencairn Beach Parking Lot to Muizenberg Station, organised through Women for Change and built as the start of something ongoing rather than a one-off. And if you’d rather just be somewhere quiet with other women who feel what you feel, After 8 Sistahood is gathering at Rondebosch Common on 30 September from 8 pm, no agenda beyond grieving and being together in public after dark. Either one, or something closer to you, go and find it. We can’t out-careful our way out of this. Something has to give, and it isn’t going to be us.