EAST RAND KILLING FIELDS: The war on women — Ekurhuleni murders highlight SA’s femicide crisis

Many of their names are well known. Olorato Mongale was murdered on her way to a date. Uyinene Mrwetyana was murdered while collecting a parcel from a post office. Kirsten Kluyts was murdered during a MyRun event. Anene Booysen was murdered after visiting a bar. 

Thousands of women are murdered in South Africa each year. Some cases spark public outrage, which leads to promises of urgent reform. Inevitably, while the cases go to court, or more often, never end up in court, the femicide continues.

Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo (38) has become the latest symbol of the war on women. She was reported missing by her eight-year-old daughter on 9 September after she failed to return home from her run. Her partially clad body was found in Rhodesfield, Ekurhuleni, and family members identified her on 14 September.

She was the first of 10 women killed in Ekurhuleni and one in Soweto since July to be publicly identified. The SAPS has appointed a task team to investigate the murders, suggesting there are similarities in their deaths, which has raised fears that they could be the victims of a serial killer, although the police have cautioned against making such conclusions. 

The bodies of the 10th and 11th victims were discovered in Ekurhuleni at the weekend. The first body was found at Mooifontein Cemetery in Thembisa on Saturday, 26 September. That evening, a suspect was arrested in connection with the murder after he allegedly fled to Tzaneen, Limpopo. 

On Sunday, the second body was found in a field near Rhokana Road in Springs. According to the police, the victim was partially clad and appeared to have been strangled.

In 2023/24, 3,422 women were murdered in South Africa. For many women, the Ekurhuleni killing spree is a stark reminder of a reality they confront every day.

The investigation

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the killings had caused “fear and uncertainty” among women and communities, and the government shared their concerns. He said he had directed that the cases be prioritised and that “no stone be left unturned” in bringing those responsible to justice.

“As a nation, we must stand up for the rights, safety and dignity of women and girls,” said Ramaphosa.

The Ekurhuleni murders prompted the SAPS to launch an intensified investigation, bringing together detectives from specialised units, including the Murder and Robbery Unit and Investigative Psychology Unit. The team also includes forensic and data specialists, fingerprint experts, intelligence officers, Home Affairs officials and criminologists.

Police are investigating the cases collectively while working to establish whether any are connected. Deputy National Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Tebello Mosikili said that addressing violence required cooperation beyond the police, pointing to issues such as poor lighting in secluded areas that fall outside the SAPS’s mandate. A R400,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to arrests.

“Capacity and capability this country has… By working with different partners, getting other resources within the country, crime will be closer to zero if we work together.”

In addition to the arrest made on Saturday, the police have arrested suspects in connection with another two of the killings:

• Busisiwe Mahlangu’s partner was arrested in connection with her murder on 17 July – two days after her body was discovered in an open field near the R21 highway in Kempton Park. 

• Last weekend, three suspects, one man and two women, were arrested in connection with Jabulile Ntimba’s murder. The third suspect was released after the 48-hour window to charge him expired, with insufficient evidence linking him to the case. Mosikili said the man remains a suspect. 

Mosikili also stated that Ntimba’s murder may have stemmed from a “love triangle”, highlighting how individual cases in this string of crimes carry unique circumstances despite broader pattern similarities.

Former SAPS profiler Professor Gérard Labuschagne has argued that, “due to the relatively close geographic proximity and time-frame of the murders and the similar victimology”, investigators should treat the murders as serial killings until evidence shows otherwise.

While the police have not confirmed a link, a multidisciplinary team is investigating the similarities between the cases.

Misplaced responsibility

Meanwhile, public safety warnings advising women to travel in groups and avoid exercising alone have sparked backlash for placing the burden of safety on women themselves.

What troubles Ekurhuleni resident Cailyn Nienaber (23) is how normal this vigilance has become for women. 

“We are taught how not to become victims far more often than men are taught not to create them. I don’t want to become better at being afraid. I don’t want women to become experts in avoiding violence. I want to live in a society that directs its energy towards the people perpetrating that violence instead of continually asking women what more we could have done to prevent it.”

Katherine Elmer-English (24) from Pietermaritzburg said she misses the carefree sense of safety she had as a child. Her mother once forbade her from running in their neighbourhood, which she resented at the time.

“I finally understand my mom, why she was willing to be the bad guy and why she was willing to let her teenage daughter be grumpy and throw hissy fits about it. That young, carefree version of me just keeps slipping past each day the more life I live and the more people, women, I meet.”

The experience of 20-year-old Makhanda resident Jesse Smailes illustrates the damaging consequences when figures of support leave survivors feeling dismissed or blamed. Smailes entrusted a psychologist with her experience of intimate-partner violence, but the practitioner described her as “silly” for “inadvertently helping” her abuser. 

Achumile Nogampula (22) from Makhanda said the murders had heightened her awareness of how women are perceived and treated. She said she is constantly conscious of being seen not simply as herself, but as “an object of desire or something to claim” – particularly at night, when she avoids walking alone.

“It’s almost like the only way we win is to stay at home or to stay where we cannot be seen. And I feel like, to a degree, that’s the ultimate goal: for women to eventually not be heard and also not be seen,” said Nogampula.

Cape Town resident Basetsana Tsuene (27) argued that addressing gender-based violence requires confronting the ways patriarchy and violence are normalised, including through appeals to “tradition” that are not necessarily rooted in precolonial African cultures. She added that change needs to happen institutionally, particularly in how perpetrators are investigated and held accountable.

“Because it’s literally a hit-and-run moment,” she said, describing how perpetrators can move through women’s lives without being identified or held accountable.

Tsuene said forensic backlogs and unresolved cases allow the cycle to continue, while political leaders who have themselves faced allegations of sexual violence can further normalise harmful behaviour, pointing to former president Jacob Zuma being cleared of rape in his 2005 trial and the recent case of suspended deputy national police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya, who faces charges including rape and sexual grooming.

“We cannot have leaders who have historically been known for raping people, for sexually assaulting people, for grooming young children, for various forms of gender-based violence.”

For Nishttha Ramnath (23), a sexual assault survivor from Johannesburg, the killings have revived painful memories. 

“You’re not just processing your own experiences; you’re living in a world where you constantly hear about other women going through things that you know, on some level, what it feels like to fear.

“Behind all of these statistics, all the data, everything is a woman who has to continue living her life afterwards. And that’s the part that gets lost,” said Ramnath.

Crisis in numbers, measured in lives

The South African Medical Research Council’s (SAMRC’s) most recent national femicide study found that femicide in SA declined substantially between 1999 and 2009 before largely plateauing, with an estimated 2,409 women killed in 2020/21, almost the same as in 2017.

But intimate-partner femicide did not follow the same pattern: three women a day were still being killed by an intimate partner, and the rate increased significantly during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The SAMRC found that South Africa’s intimate-partner femicide rate is five times the global rate.

The SAMRC argues that femicide is preventable, but says South Africa has failed to sustain the progress made in the first decade of its research. It points to the need for coordinated action on poverty and economic empowerment, childhood violence, unemployment, alcohol use, gender norms, mental healthcare and the implementation of existing laws.

Gauteng was the only province where every category of femicide – overall, intimate partner and non-intimate partner – increased between 2017 and 2020/21. The province’s intimate-partner femicide rate rose from 3.8 to 5.5 per 100,000 women, while it also reported increases in stranger killings, the category under which police are treating many of the Ekurhuleni killings.

The national picture reveals a growing crisis of impunity. Police failed to identify a perpetrator in 44.2% of femicide cases in 2020/21, more than double the rate in 1999 of 19% – an “appalling decline” in police investigation, according to the SAMRC’s researchers.

‘Men kill with impunity’

Professor Rachel Jewkes has spent three decades researching gender-based violence, gender inequality and health. She is an executive scientist at the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and has worked closely with the South African government on gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) policy. 

Her work points to a recurring problem: South Africa has evidence, research and tools to prevent violence against women, but getting them into practice remains a challenge.

The National Integrated Strategy on the Prevention of Femicide, commissioned by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and developed by the SAMRC, was designed to address gaps in the broader National Strategic Plan on GBVF. It includes measures such as improved femicide data, gender-responsive policing and more specialised investigation capacity.

But Jewkes said implementation was a problem. She pointed to a women's risk-assessment tool, intended to help identify women at high risk of intimate-partner violence, which has been in development with the government for years. According to Jewkes, a meeting this week to finalise its adoption was cancelled, with key officials reportedly attending another event instead.

“One really has to ask, ‘What is going on?’ The government’s faced with demands from the public that they deal with femicide, and they’re sitting with a tool that could help, and they consistently shy away from even holding the meetings to adopt it.”

In 2022, the government established the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. Its board, however, only started working in 2026. 

Jewkes said femicide investigations had deteriorated over the past 15 years, with some intimate-partner killings allegedly classified as accidents rather than investigated as murder. She said this contributed to women being killed with impunity and means some killings are not accurately reflected in the data.

“The vast majority of men who kill, kill with impunity. If men don’t think they’re going to get punished in any way, why on earth should they stop what they’re doing?” 

Statistics show that only about 10% of murder cases in SA lead to successful prosecutions. 

Trying to fill the gaps

For Mara Glennie, founder of the Tears Foundation and a GBV survivor, the problem extends beyond whether policies and tools exist to whether they reach people on the ground.

Glennie said children remained inadequately served by the national response, arguing that they needed a dedicated pillar within the GBVF framework.

“What is missing is a dedicated children’s pillar to reflect the fact that children are not just secondary victims; they experience unique systemic gaps and require specialised child-centric care.”

She said the disconnect between policy and implementation was also visible in the services available to survivors, with non-profit organisations shouldering much of the burden despite struggling for sustainable funding.

“They provide critical crisis intervention, counselling and essential referral services – the very pillars that should anchor a functional national response. Despite this, NPOs do not receive the sustainable financial backing necessary to maintain or scale their operations.”

Glennie said a functioning response also required properly resourced investigators, faster forensic and DNA processing, police accountability and reliable crime statistics to determine whether interventions were working. For her, the Ekurhuleni killings demonstrated the danger of responding to GBVF through bursts of attention around individual cases rather than sustained investment in the systems meant to prevent and investigate them.

“Ultimately, high-profile media coverage treats systemic violence as a series of isolated, shocking episodes. True, lasting change only occurs when the infrastructure of the justice system, such as DNA processing times, police accountability and victim support services, is funded and maintained long after the headlines disappear.”

Why the crisis needs context

Lisa Vetten, an honorary research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, has worked in the field of violence against women for more than two decades. 

She cautioned against allowing the language of crisis, disaster and urgency to replace analysis of what is actually happening, particularly as the state struggles with limited capacity and resources. 

She said the wider dysfunction within government, including corruption, meant there were too few people to implement interventions.

“My concern is that if you look at the state of government, we have the Madlanga Commission. That’s just one example of it. It’s really not able to deliver much right now…

“I think between those components that are criminal versus those who are incapable, there is really a vanishingly small number of people who have to try to implement these projects and these interventions with much-reduced money because it has all been stolen.”

Vetten pointed to the SAMRC research showing that femicide had declined substantially since 1999, while stressing that the level remained unacceptably high.

“That’s a good thing, but at the same time we obviously cannot forget that these figures still remain five times the global average.”

She argued that South Africa needs to understand what drove the decline, and why trends differ between provinces, rather than responding only with the language of crisis and disaster.

“So it’s the fact that I think we tend to go straight to the language of crisis and disaster rather than to analysis of what is actually going on that is really getting in the way here.” DM

If you or someone you know needs help

If you or someone you know is experiencing gender-based violence or abuse, support is available.

• GBV Command Centre: 0800 428 428 or Please Call Me 120 7867#

• Women Abuse Helpline: 0800 150 150

• Tears Foundation: 08000 83277 or 1347355#

• Tears email: info@tears.co.za

• The Tears Foundation provides free, confidential, 24/7 help and a FREE GBV Assessment.