News24 | Nechama Brodie | Social media posts won’t stop violence against women. Here’s what might

Nechama Brodie argues that accurate data and practical action – by police, municipalities, media, and communities – matter far more than online outrage in the fight to end violence against women.

Femicide has become an act of collective mourning in South Africa. Every few weeks, sometimes more frequently, we perform the now-standard rituals: a woman’s photo, scraped from other social media and reframed in purple; a repost, a hashtag, an emoji with a broken heart.

Occasionally, when there is a particularly prominent case – a student murdered by a stranger who should have been trustworthy, a killing field on the East Rand – the digital spills over. Small groups of people protest at courts and police stations. We are told to wear a specific colour (maybe it’s purple, or black, or red).

I understand why we do this. Our rage and our fear is real, and there is comfort in solidarity and in community. Faced with what feels like the continued indifference of the state, social media in particular has become a space where we can feel seen. But, after a decade of researching femicide, I don’t believe any of these actions (particularly online outrage) result in real change. Here’s why.

Social media often uses misleading information to highlight real issues. Last year, an organisation wrongly claimed 5 578 women had been murdered in 2023/24 – this figure was the basis of a major online campaign, which also said femicides had increased by 33.8%, and that an average of 15 women were murdered every day. Except none of these claims was correct.

The reality was still horrific, but showed a different picture: around 3 485 femicides that year, representing an increase of 1.8% from the previous year, and an average of 10 women killed every day.

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Lisa Vetten later wrote that some of the errors might be due to inconsistencies in police publications (which is a genuine issue). One single SAPS report, later retracted, had used the inflated figure, but none of the multiple other quarterly or annual reports supported this wildly improbable number (which would have been a 63% increase if it had been true!) – and it has never been corrected by the organisation in question.

Slogans don’t make women safer

Rhetoric leads to platitudes. The inflated femicide figures were at the heart of a national campaign that culminated in a day of protest, attracting international media coverage, and a demand to declare femicide a “national disaster” – which did indeed happen, shortly after the protests. Except it was a largely empty victory, because (as experienced gender violence experts had warned), the declaration had little practical meaning.

This has unfortunately also become part of the femicide ritual, where we ask for things that fit neatly into a hashtag or an Instagram slide, but are largely impractical or purely rhetorical. Campaigns drive clicks, but they don’t create any real change. Let me blunt: A good slogan isn’t going to make women safer.

Accuracy matters. When I point out glaring errors in femicide figures, like the case above, a response I often get is that numbers don’t matter, because the problem is so bad. Numbers, and data, matter a great deal, because they allow us to understand the problem as a national crisis, as a local phenomenon, and as a set of individual lives lost. Numbers can tell us which provinces, which metros, which police stations we need to pay attention to. They can tell us how murders change over time.

In mid-2025, the police suddenly stopped sharing data on crimes against women and children after identifying a number of discrepancies in its own records, including duplications of figures. These were finally reintroduced in August 2026, after more than a year. We still don’t know what the figures were for this period, and without accurate data, developing solutions that might actually work is nearly impossible. The only thing inaccurate data is good for is clickbait, fundraising, and political campaigning.

Not every femicide is the same. Most women are murdered by a current or former intimate partner, with family members making up the second-largest group of perpetrators. These kinds of killings require different policing and protection strategies for women who are attacked and harmed by strangers. Again, this is why we need proper data. Femicide is complex and does not have a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Even if we can accept that entrenched misogyny is an underlying factor, it’s not a singular (or easily solvable) problem.

Femicide has actually declined. According to the latest quarterly reports, between April and June 2026, 569 women were murdered. For the same three-month period in 2024 (the last year we have data), 966 women were murdered. This suggests a 41% decrease in femicide numbers over two years. Yes, the figures are still unacceptably high, but it’s a significant shift in the right direction. Social media campaigns don’t seem to acknowledge this because it doesn’t suit their narrative.

You might still be thinking “so what?”. What’s the harm in showing grief or solidarity? Surely it’s not hurting anyone? The problem is that posting about the wrong things makes us a) feel like we’re “doing something”, or b) like there’s “nothing else we can do”, neither of which is true. We’re (still) not asking for real actions that could have immediate benefits.

Here are a few steps I think we should focus on instead.

What the police should be doing

• Releasing regular, accurate data on femicide. This should be presented as a separate report, released together with each quarter’s crime statistics.

• Repeated national femicide studies conducted by the South African Medical Research Council note that many femicide dockets don’t exist, or go missing. To address this, a joint operations or similar committee could be established in each metro or local government area, tasked with oversight on case management and progress. Missing dockets should be flagged immediately. 

• We can’t fast-track cases without improving investigative capacity and competence. Successful investigations and prosecutions rely on better police work, which includes gathering and preserving good-quality forensic evidence immediately after a crime, not days or weeks later. For femicide cases, forensic evidence also needs to be processed more swiftly. This requires updated forensic training for police officers and more scrutiny of, and resources for, forensic laboratories.

• There’s almost no police strategy for the prevention of intimate femicides. The majority of murders are committed by intimate partners, and usually preceded by a history of violence. These must be considered as potentially preventable crimes, and women and families must be empowered to report violence, and be taken seriously, and supported, before it escalates.

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What municipalities and local governments can do:

• Improve street lighting. This is a simple intervention, directly linked to improved safety. But it’s often at the bottom of the “to-do” list, perhaps because it has limited media appeal.

• Increase metro patrols. Instead of “revenue-generating” activities like roadblocks and harassing informal traders, metro police units should be tasked with increased patrols.

What the media should do

• Set up dedicated crime desks to report more widely on major and violent crimes, not just high-profile cases. Crimes in small towns and remote areas are less likely to get coverage, but are just as important.

• Following up on cases is just as important as reporting when they happen. Checking on the progress of cases months, even years after the murder has taken place is an essential way of holding our police and justice system to account… but it also needs more reporters and more resources, something fewer and fewer newsrooms have.

• Fact-checking the data, and resisting the urge to publish endless op-eds. People rely on journalism because it’s supposed to be information we can trust. When major news organisations uncritically repeat false and inflated figures, it undermines credibility. Instead, news organisations should use accurate data to drive better stories.

What you can do (instead of reposting on social media)

• Pay for news. Journalists are almost always going to do a better job of accurate, balanced and fair reporting on both crime and justice. Instead of adding to a private organisation’s BackaBuddy campaign that will only produce more social media posts, take out a subscription to a news site.

• Find a local women’s shelter in your area and find out what they need, directly – the National Shelter Movement of South Africa has a list of shelters around the country. Many of them are not on social media, because they don’t have budgets for big campaigns, or they can’t post because of privacy and safety issues. But they do need your help.

• Join your local Community Policing Forum. This is an effective way to make a difference to policing and safety in your own community.

There’s one other thing we could do that would most likely make a massive difference in reducing violence against women (and children, and violence in general), which is to curb our country’s alcohol consumption. But as this is sadly unlikely to happen, I haven’t included it as a list of practical steps.

- Dr Nechama Brodie is a journalist and an academic. She is the author of ‘Femicide in South Africa’ and ‘Domestic Terror’.

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