Eleven bodies in Ekurhuleni

South Africa responded to gender-based violence deaths in Ekurhuleni with a presidential address on Heritage Day calling it a national shame, but the country keeps reacting only after violence turns fatal.

Most perpetrators are teenagers

Research on convicted rapists in South Africa found that three-quarters of male perpetrators committed their first assault before the age of twenty, at an average age of seventeen.

The scale of South Africa's crisis

More than thirty-six percent of South African women report having experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Police recorded fifty-four thousand forty sexual offence cases in a single year, an average of one hundred forty-eight a day.

Most men admit to violence

In a two thousand twenty-one survey, seventy-six percent of South African men admitted to having committed gender-based violence at some point in their lives. That is most men, self-reporting.

“That is not a fringe statistic about a violent minority. It is most men, self-reporting.”

Sierra Leone's school programme works

A whole-school programme run across two hundred schools between two thousand twenty-three and two thousand twenty-four in Sierra Leone included training teachers and school leaders, building reporting systems, and running age-appropriate lessons on gender-based violence.

Sierra Leone's results

The Sierra Leone programme decreased the number of students experiencing sexual violence from eighty-five percent to fifty-two percent, decreased support for corporal punishment from fifty-one percent to seventeen percent, and produced a five-fold increase in positive gender attitudes among students, from five percent to twenty-seven percent.

Zimbabwe and Mozambique also succeed

In Zimbabwe, a whole-school approach brought teachers, school heads and students together to build a shared plan for preventing violence. In Mozambique, a cascade-training model ran school clubs where learners learned to recognise abuse and report it.

Violence is learned by age fourteen

Fieldwork shows boys gazing at and gossiping about girls, girls coerced into relationships and beaten for refusing. A two thousand twenty-five Western Cape study found these behaviours are so deeply set by age ten to fourteen that sexually active teens who perpetrated coercive acts often did not recognise them as rape.

South Africa already has the laws

South Africa has the Schools Act, the Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Offences Act and a national gender-equality policy framework. Experts say the law is not the missing piece, but enforcement and classroom-level implementation are.

NGOs focus on crisis response

A study of nine gender-based violence NGOs operating across South Africa found that all nine focus exclusively on secondary and tertiary support, providing counselling, shelters and legal aid. Not one runs a primary prevention programme aimed at addressing the issue before it starts.

Classroom is where change happens

Femicide, intimate partner violence and workplace harassment do not begin in adulthood but years earlier with behaviour that schools should help shape. Concepts like consent and sexual autonomy need to be taught as routinely as maths.

“Concepts like consent and what counts as sexual autonomy need to be taught as routinely as maths.”