Ekurhuleni murder cases put police response under scrutiny as women ask who should carry the cost of safety

Eight women are dead in Ekurhuleni and the question South Africans are asking is not how they should have behaved, but who was supposed to stop the men who killed them.

The bodies were found in the municipality east of Johannesburg, among them Elizabeth Moselakgomo, known to those close to her as Tsontso. The discovery has put the policing of violence against women back at the centre of public argument, and it has produced a rare thing in this country’s public life, a near-consensus that the advice women receive is not the same thing as protection.

As eNCA reported on 16 September, the response on social media has been dominated by women asking why their routines, their routes and their habits are the subject of the conversation when the men who commit the violence are not. UN Women South Africa said women should never have to change how they live, work or move because of fear, and that the responsibility for their safety belongs to institutions and to society. The author and activist Jackie Phamotse made the same point in a different register, saying warnings are issued to women about how to avoid abuse while accountability is not directed at the men who commit it.

That is not a slogan. It is a description of how the system is built.

What the law already says

South Africa has the legal architecture to treat this as a crime problem and not a lifestyle problem. The Domestic Violence Act places a duty on police officers to act on a complaint, to open a case and to serve a protection order. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act created the National Register for Sex Offenders. The SAPS has a Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences unit, known as FCS, with dedicated detectives in every province. Parliament has repeatedly tightened the rules, including on bail and on minimum sentences for sexual offences.

The gap is not the statute book. It is whether a woman who walks into a police station at eleven at night is taken seriously, whether a docket is opened, whether an FCS detective is assigned, whether the accused is arrested and whether the case reaches court. Those are the questions that determine whether the law is a promise or a fact, and they are the questions that the Ekurhuleni cases now put directly to the South African Police Service and to the National Prosecuting Authority.

Where the numbers sit

The SAPS quarterly crime statistics have for years shown that the majority of women killed in this country are killed by someone they know, most often an intimate partner. That is the pattern that makes the safety-tips conversation so hollow. A woman cannot be advised out of a household. She cannot be advised out of a relationship, a marriage, a shared home or a man who has decided that her life is his to end. The advice assumes a stranger in a dark street. The data describes a kitchen, a bedroom, a car park outside a family home.

The second thing the numbers show is that reporting a case is not the same as resolving it. Conviction rates in sexual offences and in intimate partner killings remain the point at which the system most often fails, and it fails at the stage where the state is the only actor with the power to act.

What the state has done, and what is being asked of it

The SAPS has publicised its FCS capacity and its GBV desks at police stations, and the police have in recent years run awareness campaigns and taken part in the annual 16 Days of Activism programme. Where those structures work, they work because a specific station commander and a specific detective treat the docket as urgent. That is the part worth crediting, and it is the part that should be scaled rather than celebrated as an exception.

The harder question, and the one the Ekurhuleni cases put to the authorities, is what happened in the period before these eight women were killed. Were there complaints, protection orders, prior reports, prior arrests, and if there were, what was done with them. The families of the dead are entitled to that answer, and so is every woman in the country who is currently deciding whether it is worth walking into a police station.

What changes for a reader

If you live in Ekurhuleni, the practical effect is a heavier police presence in the areas where the bodies were found and a heightened public awareness that will fade. If you are a woman anywhere in South Africa, the effect is the one the social media posts describe, a calculation about routes and times and doors that no amount of advice will settle, because the threat is not in the street.

The conversation now moves to the institutions. The SAPS has a standing obligation to report on the investigation into these deaths, on whether any arrests have been made, and on the dockets that preceded them. The NPA has an obligation to say whether prosecutions are being prepared. The Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities has an obligation to say what support is reaching the families.

The Enquirer will follow the case as it moves through the courts and will report what the police and the prosecuting authority say about each of the eight women, in the order the law requires, and in the order their families deserve.

Source: eNCA, “‘Stop telling women how to stay alive’: Social media reacts to Ekurhuleni murders” (16 September 2026).