Hitting home — how a motorist panic button is a lifeline for GBV victims

Between 14 July and 1 October, the Automobile Association’s (AA’s) emergency response service received 88 panic alerts tagged as gender-based or sexual violence. That is more than one a day. 

Sixty-one were tagged as domestic abuse, 14 as gender-based violence, 12 as rape, four as sexual offences, and one as stalking. Some alerts carried more than one tag. Our teams also handled about 107 domestic disputes in the same period. 

We built this service to protect people on the move. But most of these alerts were about violence at home. 

She said she was fine 

At 1.09am on 26 September, a panic alert reached our control room. The woman who sent it told the controller she was fine. 

The controller heard otherwise. She moved the conversation to WhatsApp, where the woman could type what she could not say out loud. Her partner had assaulted her. 

When the woman walked out of the house, an AA response officer was waiting to drive her to the police station. 

That call is the part of our work that almost nobody sees. Behind every one of those 88 alerts is a woman who pressed a button on one of her worst nights. 

From our records

Every story below comes from our control room records, anonymised to protect the women involved. 

• On 13 September, a woman was assaulted by her husband and mother-in-law in front of her children. She was bleeding from a head injury. Our controller sent a response partner seven minutes away and stayed on the line with the SA Police Service (SAPS) until the police van arrived. Her husband was arrested. She and her children were taken to her parents’ home. 

• Just after 2am on 8 August, a woman’s husband, under the influence, was trying to break into her home. Armed response personnel were three minutes out. She asked the officer to jump the wall, and the controller approved, so no time was lost. The controller kept calling until she was on her way to the police station. 

• In a separate incident that same day, a woman was being held in a man’s room. He refused to open the door to our team and threatened to sue. Unwilling to leave her there, the controller sent a second team. An officer got her out and waited with her until her Uber arrived, later calling to make sure she reached home safely.

• Elsewhere, a woman ran from her boyfriend while a controller stayed on the line, directing her to a mall where our officer met her.

• On 24 September, a woman who had been beaten in front of her children stood outside her own yard, too afraid to go in. Our officer stayed with her, and the partner was removed from the home. She and her children went back inside. 

Hours from the police 

Two cases in our records stand out for a different reason. 

An elderly woman had been sexually assaulted. Our controller logged the case with the SAPS and provincial services within minutes, then followed up for more than three hours until they arrived. They took her to hospital and opened a case. 

In another case, a controller kept calling for more than two hours until police and an ambulance were helping a young girl. 

These are our records, not a national study, but they raise a question that someone in authority should answer: why does a woman need a motoring association’s control room to keep calling before the police reach her door? 

Here is a proposal, not a complaint: The SAPS should publish, by province, how long it takes to respond to gender-based violence callouts every quarter. If the times are good, publishing them costs nothing. If they are not, the country needs to know. 

Freedom of movement 

If it moves, it concerns me. That includes a woman fleeing on foot from her home in the middle of the night. 

Mobility is the freedom to change your circumstances. For a woman in danger, that freedom starts with being able to leave, and knowing help is on the way. DM