Gender-based violence is not simply an accumulation of individual crimes; it is a manifestation of structural inequality woven into the fabric of society. It is a social justice crisis that has metastasised into every corner of our lives, physical and digital. If GBV is fundamentally a question of structural inequality, then our philanthropic response must be equally structural.
On 21 November 2025, thousands of women dressed in blacklay on the ground across South Africafor 15 minutes. One minute for every woman murdered each day in this country. The silence was deafening.
TheWomen for Changemovement had seized the global spotlight on the eve of the G20 Summit, forcing world leaders gathering in Johannesburg to confront an uncomfortable truth: you cannot speak about economic growth while women’s bodies remain the battlefield beneath it. This was not merely a protest. It was a national reckoning with a crisis that President Cyril Ramaphosa would finallydeclare a national disaster– a recognition that came not from political will alone, but from the weight of more than one million signatures and the bodies of 15 women lost every single day.
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The question we must now ask is not whether GBV constitutes an emergency, but whether we possess the collective courage to address it as the structural injustice it truly represents. The statistics paint a picture of a society at war with half its population. More than one in three South African women – nearly 36% – have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, according to theFirst South African National Gender-Based Violence Studyreleased in 2024.
This translates to more than seven million women who have endured physical violence and more than two million who have survived sexual violence. South Africa’s femicide rate stands at five times the global average, with 5,578 women murdered between April 2023 and March 2024, a shocking 33.8% increase from the previous year. But these numbers, as staggering as they are, tell only part of the story.
GBV is not simply an accumulation of individual crimes; it is a manifestation of structural inequality woven into the fabric of society. It is economic when women cannot leave abusive relationships because they lack financial independence. It is economic when women bear the brunt of mass unemployment, hunger, malnutrition and income poverty.
It is economic when it is women who provide unrecognised and unpaid labour for care in the home, protecting children and the elderly from the failures of the state in social security. It is psychological when controlling behaviours systematically erode a woman’s sense of self. It is institutional when survivors face secondary victimisation in police stations and courtrooms designed without their dignity in mind.
Now, this violence has found fertile ground in the digital world, creating new battlefields where anonymity emboldens perpetrators and harm spreads at the speed of a click. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,95% of online aggressive behaviour and abusive language in South Africa is aimed at women and girls.
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