POLICY GAPS OP-ED: More guns won’t make South African women safer, but stronger controls will

The discovery of nine women’s bodies in Ekurhuleni has, again, shone a light on South Africa’s gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) crisis, which, at five times the global average, is one of the highest in the world. 

It has also laid bare, again, the failures of policing and local government to keep women safe. With those on full display, the conversation in homes, on social media and in newsrooms has turned to what women themselves can do to stay safe. 

Into that anxious search for answers has stepped a familiar and dangerous message: that a gun will keep a woman safe. A social media post by a pro-gun public official, tagged #EndGBV, shows an image of a woman at a shooting range, gun raised, captioned “Be lawfully armed, be trained, carry, be ready”. It is a seductive message that gun dealers and firearm lobbyists push relentlessly, because fear sells guns. 

It is also dangerously wrong, and making it is highly irresponsible.

There is no evidence globally that a gun makes a woman safe. There is overwhelming evidence that more guns make women less safe. This is visible in the South African Medical Research Council’s tracking of femicide through four national surveys over 20 years. It shows that gun-related femicide fell sharply in the decade after South Africa’s 2000 Firearm Control Act came into effect. 

Gains lost

Intimate-partner femicide dropped from four women killed a day to three, driven largely by this decline in gun deaths. However, the gains in women’s lives started reversing from 2010, as gun controls weakened and more firearms circulated. 

By 2020/21, guns had become the single most common way women were killed in South Africa – the highest rate ever recorded, and involved in over a third of all femicides. The sharpest rise was among women killed by intimate partners: firearm deaths in that group nearly doubled between 2017 and 2020/21.

Femicide is the most extreme form of violence against women, but it only tells part of the story. Global research shows that for every person who dies by gunshot, roughly two more are treated in hospital for non-fatal firearm injuries. This means that alongside the 900 women shot dead in 2020/21, 1,800 more may have been wounded, many with life-changing injuries. 

Gunshot wounds commonly cause spinal cord and brain injuries, and amputations. In South Africa, where pre-hospital care is limited and patients often reach poorly equipped facilities, the odds of permanent disability are far higher.

Guns don’t have to be shot to harm. Drawing on protection order applications, research from the Removing the Trigger campaign documents how guns are used to threaten and intimidate. In almost all cases the victims were women and girls, and while an intimate partner was the most common perpetrator, other family members, particularly brothers and sons, also used guns to terrorise and coerce. All the women and girls who reported being threatened with a gun also reported psychological and emotional abuse.

Connected pieces of the same crisis

Given this, it is deeply worrying that South Africa’s 2020-2030 National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide does not mention firearms. Instead, GBVF and gun violence are treated as two separate problems rather than as connected pieces of the same crisis. 

The gap shows up in practice, too: when courts order a firearm removed as part of a protection order, police follow-through is inconsistent, with no process to confirm back to the courts that it happened. Private security guards feature disproportionately in intimate partner violence, yet the industry has no clear channel for families to report abuse or for companies to act on complaints involving firearms. 

Equally crucial are clear systems mandating the removal of guns immediately once an interim protection order is issued, and permanently once a final order is granted. Proposed amendments to the Firearms Control Act could do all of this, and should be welcomed by anyone serious about protecting women.

The firearm industry is large and politically influential, and gun lobby groups have every commercial and ideological incentive to frame a firearm as a woman’s best protection by sanitising and “de-risking” them, whatever the evidence says. That interest needs to be named and resisted, not amplified in a moment of collective fear.

Femicide is preventable, and women across South Africa deserve better than slogans and a hashtag campaign or a gun lobbyist’s Facebook page. The government declared GBVF a national disaster more than a year ago, yet the basics needed to keep women safe are still missing.

Accurate data

Accurate femicide data is unavailable. Effective policing, including gathering and preserving forensic evidence, is poor. Investigations into femicide cases are themselves weak: the police increasingly fail to identify a perpetrator at all, let alone establish whether he was an intimate partner even though an intimate partner remains the person most likely to have killed her. 

A comprehensive strategy to address GBVF that recognises guns as the leading weapon used to murder women is missing. So, too, is a commitment to strengthen the Firearms Control Act to streamline the removal of firearms where GBVF risk is identified despite fierce resistance from the gun lobby.

It is long past time our government prioritised women’s lives over the interests of a lobby and industry whose only concern is profit and ideology, whatever the cost in lives lost, families torn apart and communities left living in fear. DM

Claire Taylor is a Research and Policy Analyst at Gun Free South Africa, and writes on behalf of Removing the Trigger: Strengthening the Rights and Safety of Victims from Gun-Related Domestic Violence, a partnership between Gun Free South Africa, Mosaic Training Service & Healing Centre, the National Shelter Movement of South Africa, and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.