A tenth body, and a commissioner told women are dying
A broadcast exchange lays out the gap between what the state says it is doing about killings of women in Ekurhuleni and the pace critics say it is moving at.
A tenth woman’s body has been found in Ekurhuleni, and the discovery has sharpened a public argument about how fast the state is moving on killings of women in the province.
The figure and the exchange around it come from a broadcast published by eNCA, in which a commissioner was pressed on the government’s response to a run of killings. The charge put to him was direct: women are dying, and that is a fact, not an assertion.
The commissioner did not dispute the deaths. He disputed the conclusion drawn from them. It is wrong, he said, to say the government is not doing anything, and he set out what he described as work already under way.
That work includes a whole-of-government approach, which he said he had discussed with the minister, the premier and the deputy minister, all of whom had been conducting a visit the previous day. The reasoning he offered is that crimes of this kind are committed in homes and in places where police cannot be stationed on every corner, so the response has to extend beyond policing alone.
He also pointed to a case in Don Park which he said has been resolved, with the matter now moving through the courts and its finality still to be determined. And he said the state is working closely with the community, on the basis that these crimes are committed within communities and that some of those committing them are from those same communities.
The interviewer’s concern was not with any single intervention but with pace. With a tenth body found and classifications in place, the worry put to the commissioner was that government and law enforcement are not moving quickly enough. The word used was crisis.
The commissioner’s own description of the situation was that it is distressful. What he rejected was the characterisation of inaction.
No further detail on the tenth discovery, the identity of the woman, the circumstances of her death or the status of any investigation into it was stated in the broadcast.
Source: eNCA (YouTube), Pressure builds as tenth woman’s body is found in Ekurhuleni
