Stop teaching women how not to be murdered and focus on the men killing them

Five women, two months, all found half-naked, bruised and discarded near the R21 in Kempton Park as though they were something that needed to be disposed of. The latest confirmed: Elizabeth Moselakgomo (38) who left her home for an afternoon run on 9 September and did not come back. Her family spent days hoping. They got a body too battered to be immediately identified. And the official public communication – the thing the South African Police Service chose to say out loud to the nation – was a warning directed at women to exercise extreme caution, to take extra precautions, particularly those who exercise outdoors.

Elizabeth Moselakgomo went for a run. That is all she did. Something millions of South African women calculate carefully before attempting. We map routes. We share our locations. We carry our keys between our fingers. We make the quiet, exhausting calculations that have become second nature to women simply trying to move through the world. When she went missing, most of us knew. Not because we had access to the investigation. But because we have all, over years of living in this country, become deeply and grimly accustomed to how this goes. We knew because we know men. We know what men in South Africa do. We know how these stories end. The missing woman near the area where bodies were being found was never going to be a story about someone who simply got lost. We knew she would not come home. We just had to wait for the confirmation. And the response is to tell the next woman to be more careful.

I want to name the absurdity of this directly. When people commit fraud, we do not warn banks to hide their money better. When people drink and drive, we do not warn pedestrians to stay off the roads. But when men murder women; when they hunt them, overpower them, bruise them, strip them and leave them in open veld near a highway, it is women who are warned. It is suggested, with all the sincerity of people who believe they are helping, that the solution to being hunted is to make yourself a smaller target.

This is not a safety strategy. It is an admission, dressed up as concern, that we have decided men’s behaviour is the fixed variable in this equation, and women’s freedom is the one that must be adjusted.

In a chapter of my memoir, Unfathered, I write that “the problem is men”. And I mean that with the full weight of the evidence. Not just the men who kill. But the men who know things and say nothing. The men who see things and look away. And the men who are themselves afraid of other men; who lock their gates at night and clutch their belongings in the same streets, because male violence does not even spare its own.

One social media user captured the public frustration precisely: “SAPS is disappointing – instead of placing a trap they decide to make a public statement warning the perpetrators to chill.” That is not just a frustrated comment. That is a diagnosis. We have a well-rehearsed script for moments like this. The bodies are found. The horror spreads on social media. The task teams are assembled. The warnings to women are issued. The nation pays attention for a week, maybe two. And then the next news cycle arrives, and somewhere another woman laces up her running shoes and steps outside into a world that has still not decided that she deserves to be safe in it.

The Kempton Park murders are exceptional in their visibility, but not in their underlying cause. The cause is ordinary. So ordinary in fact that we have built an entire infrastructure of warnings around it: warning women about parking garages, running alone, what to wear, which areas to avoid. Of course women should take reasonable precautions. But precautions are not prevention. A woman changing her route does not address the man hunting women. A woman staying home does not address the man who believes he has the right to violate her. At some point, we have to stop confusing restrictions on women’s lives with solutions to men’s violence.

Here is what a genuine public safety response should look like: place the focus on identifying, apprehending and prosecuting the perpetrators. Tell communities what information matters and how to report it. Make it clear that anyone with knowledge of these crimes has a responsibility to come forward. Place the burden where it belongs: on the people creating the crisis, not on the people surviving it.

Stop telling women to be careful as though we were not already. As though Elizabeth Moselakgomo was not already being as careful as a woman in South Africa learns, from childhood, to be. How much more careful must we become? How many more routes must we abandon, streets avoid and public spaces surrender before we admit that the problem is not that women are insufficiently cautious? The problem is that someone believes he is entitled to hurt them. And that someone is always a man. Yes, it is not all men. But it is always a man.

The killer, or killers, in Kempton Park is the acute expression of something chronic. The task team will do its work, and I sincerely hope that justice is served. But when they are done, I need us to ask the harder question. Not who did this. We will find out who did this. I need us to ask why we keep producing men who believe they can. And I need us, the next time a woman is murdered, to resist the reflex of warning her gender. DM