Police open docket after a tenth woman's body is found near Johannesburg

Gauteng police have opened an investigation after the body of a tenth woman was found near Johannesburg, a killing that has again turned attention to how this country counts and prosecutes the murder of women.

As Al Jazeera English reported on 26 September, police are investigating the killings. That outlet published the discovery of the tenth body and placed it against South Africa’s femicide rate, which it described as among the highest in the world. The Enquirer has not been able to establish from that report the woman’s identity, the place where she was found, the cause of death, the interval between the killings or whether police have connected the deaths to one suspect or several.

The South African Police Service investigates murder under the Criminal Procedure Act and the common law offence of murder, and a docket of this kind is opened at a station, referred to a detective unit and, where a suspect is identified, taken to the National Prosecuting Authority for a decision to prosecute. Where deaths are suspected to be linked, the SAPS has in past cases assembled a task team and appealed to the public for information. Whether any of that has happened here is not established by the material available.

Femicide is a category this country does measure, and it is worth being precise about what the measurement is. The SAPS records murder in its quarterly and annual crime statistics, and researchers who study the killing of women work from those records, from mortuary data and from court rolls. The figure that circulates most often, that South Africa has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, rests on that body of work and is repeated by the SAPS, by the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities and by the research community. It is a rate, not a count, and it is derived from reported cases, which means it is a floor rather than a ceiling.

For an ordinary reader the practical consequence is narrower and more concrete than a ranking. A murder docket determines whether a family gets an arrest, a court date and an answer. The courts run dedicated sexual offences courts and the NPA has specialised units for sexual offences and gender-based violence, and the difference between a rate in a report and a prosecution in a courtroom is the work of those institutions. The SAPS also runs a gender-based violence command centre and family violence, child protection and sexual offences units, which is where a case of this kind would ordinarily be routed.

What the discovery of a tenth body does not by itself establish is a single perpetrator, a serial pattern or a specific motive. Police have not said so in the material available. What it does establish is that a family is now waiting for a docket to move.

The Enquirer has asked the SAPS for confirmation of the case, the number of bodies connected to the investigation and the unit handling it, and will report the response. Anyone with information on a killing can contact the SAPS on 10111 or the gender-based violence command centre on 0800 428 428.

Source: Al Jazeera English, South African police discover body of 10th woman near Johannesburg