A Woman Should Not Have to Be Afraid of You

There is something deeply wrong with a society where a woman has to calculate her safety before she calculates where she wants to go.
Which road is safer?
What time is it?
Should I walk alone?
Should I tell somebody where I am?
Should I share my location?
Should I carry something?
Should I call somebody while I walk?
Is this Uber driver safe?
Should I avoid drinking?
Should I avoid that man?
Should I avoid being alone with him?
Should I change what I am wearing?
Should I leave before it gets dark?
Should I trust him?

These are not questions that women should have to answer simply because they exist in the same society as men. Unfortunately nowadays they do. South Africa has become so accustomed to the conversation around gender-based violence that we have started treating women’s fear as part of the furniture.
It isn’t.

A woman should be able to walk home without calculating the probability of being attacked. She should be able to reject a man without wondering whether his ego will turn rejection into violence. And she should be able to leave a relationship without fearing that leaving will cost her life.

As I write this, South Africa is again confronting a disturbing series of women’s deaths in and around Ekurhuleni.

Police are investigating multiple cases after women’s bodies were discovered in the area over a period of roughly two months. One of the victims was 38-year-old Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, a mother who disappeared after leaving home for a run. Her family positively identified her body at the Germiston mortuary on Monday.

By Tuesday, police had expanded the number of women whose deaths were being investigated in the broader Ekurhuleni cases to seven, after including the body of a woman found in a river in Clayville on 7 September. Later that evening, EWN reported that an eighth female body had been discovered in KwaThema. Police have said similarities exist between some of the cases, but they have not established that all of the deaths are connected or that they were committed by the same perpetrator or group. Those investigations are ongoing. (EWN)

Even though we should not turn an active investigation into a conclusion simply because the circumstances are horrifying, the fear surrounding these cases does not need a courtroom verdict before it becomes real. Our mothers and sisters are already living with this fear.

The latest Statistics South Africa Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey found that only 37.9% of South Africans felt safe walking alone in their neighbourhoods after dark in 2025/26. Among women, 45.1% said they felt very unsafe walking alone in their areas when it was dark, compared with 38.8% of men. The proportion of people who had done something to protect themselves against crime increased to 46.6%. (Statistics South Africa)

Think about what that actually means.

A significant part of the population is changing the way they live because they are afraid of crime. And women are carrying a particularly heavy part of that fear. This is not paranoia. It is forced adaptation. And when women repeatedly have to modify their behaviour to accommodate the possibility of male violence, eventually we need to stop asking women how they can become safer and start asking men why women need to be this careful around us in the first place. That question matters.

Sure we can argue that men are disproportionately represented among perpetrators of serious violence against women. And that men are not incapable of being victims themselves. That’s not the point. It’s poetry without being intellectually honest about where much of the violence is coming from.

Statistics South Africa’s latest survey found that 70.3% of female assault victims experienced assault at the hands of someone they knew, including a spouse or intimate partner (31.4%), friend or acquaintance (19.8%), relative or other household member (17.3%), and employer or boss (1.8%). (Statistics South Africa)

And this changes the conversation because the threat is not always the stranger lurking in an alley. Sometimes the threat is the person sleeping next to her.

The boyfriend whose jealousy has become surveillance.
The husband who interprets disagreement as disrespect.
The ex who cannot accept that the relationship ended.
The man who believes that being told no is an insult rather than an answer.
The friend who thinks a woman’s intoxication is an opportunity.
The colleague who interprets friendliness as sexual availability.
The acquaintance who believes persistence is romantic.
The man who hears “stop” and negotiates.
The man who hears “no” and asks why.
The man who hears “leave me alone” and becomes angry that she has the audacity to mean it.

Somewhere along the way, we have managed to create a particularly dangerous cultural confusion:

We have taught too many men that rejection is something that has happened to them, rather than a boundary being exercised by another human being.

A woman does not owe you access because you bought her dinner.
She does not owe you sex because she kissed you.
She does not owe you affection because you are her boyfriend.
She does not owe you another chance because you apologised.
She does not owe you a relationship because you love her.
She does not owe you motherhood because you impregnated her.
She does not owe you forgiveness because you regret what you did.
And she certainly does not owe you her life because you cannot cope with losing access to hers.

There is no humiliation in rejection.
There is no emasculation in hearing no.
And there certainly is no justification for violence hiding inside wounded pride.
You can be heartbroken and angry.
So go cry about it or walk away.
You can sit alone in your room and curse the entire fucking universe. You can speak to your friends or therapist.
Write a song for all I care.
You can even be like a real man and hit the gym.
You are allowed to grieve. You can heal.
But you do not get to turn your pain into somebody else’s punishment.

And this is where I want to clarify something written by Poker Black on the previous article I Understand Suicide.

About boys who are abused.
Boys who are neglected.
Boys who are sexually groomed.
Boys who grow up around violence.
Boys who are taught that masculinity means domination, emotional silence and sexual conquest.

All of those conversations matter. But they cannot become excuses. A traumatic childhood may help us understand a violent adult. But it does not absolve him.
Poverty does not absolve him.
Alcohol does not absolve him.
Drugs do not absolve him.
A violent father does not absolve him.
Being cheated on does not absolve him.
Being rejected does not absolve him.
Depression does not absolve him.
Being sexually abused as a child does not absolve him.

Nothing that happened to a man gives him ownership over another person’s body.

We need to stop confusing explanation with justification. You can understand where a behaviour came from and still condemn the behaviour completely. In fact, we have to. Because if we cannot hold both ideas simultaneously, we become useless at preventing violence.
If a boy is abused, protect him.
If a boy witnesses domestic violence, intervene.
If a boy is sexually groomed, believe him.
If a boy is taught that women exist for his pleasure, correct him.
If a boy is becoming violent, intervene before he becomes a violent man.

If a man is displaying controlling behaviour, take it seriously.
If a man threatens his partner, do not wait for the threat to become a body. When an adult man chooses to rape, assault or murder a woman, the responsibility belongs to him.
Not his childhood, not his father, not his mother, not his ex, alcohol, feminism, unemployment nor society.
It’s him. He is responsible and accountable for his actions.

That does not mean we stop investigating the conditions that produce violence. It means we investigate them without removing the perpetrator from the centre of his own decision.

We talk about gender-based violence as though the problem begins at the moment a woman is attacked.

It doesn’t.

By the time a woman is lying on the floor, something has already gone catastrophically wrong. By the time a woman is reporting a rape, her body is already defiled. And by the time a family is identifying a body in a mortuary, prevention has already failed.

We could also argue that the real problem starts earlier with subtle queues and red flags that we disregard.

The latest national data also tells us something worth examining rather than conveniently ignoring: South Africans themselves overwhelmingly identify substance abuse and alcohol abuse among the factors they associate with violence against women and children. In the 2025/26 Stats SA survey, 84.4% of men and 85.3% of women identified addiction, substance abuse or alcohol abuse as a cause of such violence. Financial stress, loss or lack of values, unemployment, infidelity, relationship problems and family histories of violence were among other factors identified. (Statistics South Africa)

But again, we need to be precise. Alcohol can increase risk, does not rape a woman, decide to beat her or to murder her.
A man does. And this distinction matters because blaming alcohol alone gives violent men another place to hide.

We have become very good at finding places for men to hide.

We hide them behind:

“He was drunk, or angry.”
“He loved her. They were fighting.”
“It was surely a misunderstanding.”
“He was going through a lot.”
“He couldn’t control himself and he apologised.”
“He is actually a good guy. What did she do?”

No.

A good man does not become morally exempt because he eventually says sorry.

An apology does not reverse a broken jaw.
It does not restore a raped body.
It does not return a murdered woman to her children.
It does not erase fear from the person who now has to sleep with the lights on.
And it certainly does not resurrect the dead.

South Africa has already recognised that this problem requires more than slogans. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide was adopted in 2020 as a society-wide framework built around prevention, accountability, justice, response, economic empowerment and research. Government continues to develop prevention programmes and institutional responses. (The Presidency)

So this is not a country lacking words. We have words, the summits, the campaigns, strategies, commemorative days, hashtags, speeches and outrage.

We need is a culture in which a man’s control over himself is considered a basic requirement of adulthood rather than an impressive achievement.

Controlling yourself as a man is not heroism. Men don’t deserve a medal for not raping somebody nor get praised for not hitting their partner or celebrated for accepting rejection without becoming violent. How do you expect an applause for respecting consent?

And men need to understand something else:

• Your masculinity is not under attack because a woman has boundaries.
• Your masculinity is not under attack because a woman earns more money than you.
• Your masculinity is not under attack because a woman leaves you.
• Your masculinity is not under attack because she chooses another man.
• Your masculinity is not under attack because she does not want you.
• Your masculinity is not something a woman can take from you.

If your sense of manhood collapses because a woman said no, the problem was never the woman.

And perhaps this is where men need to become brutally honest with one another.

We cannot keep demanding that women teach us how to behave while expecting them to them to tell us how to stop other men. Men need to ask themselves why do we still expect women to carry the burden of preventing male violence while men sit comfortably outside the conversation because “not all men.”

Of course not all men. That sentence is so obvious that it has become almost useless. The question was never whether every man is a rapist. The question is what the men who aren’t rapists are prepared to do about the men who are.

What does a decent man do when another man crosses the line?

Because a man doesn’t need to be violent himself to contribute to the environment in which violence survives.
The friend who knows.
The brother who knows.
The colleague who knows.
The teammate who knows.
The father who knows.
The guy who says, “That’s just how he is.”

That’s a completely different form of accountability because: Will you challenge your friend?
Will you intervene when you see harassment?
Will you refuse to laugh at rape jokes?
Will you stop treating sexual aggression as a demonstration of masculinity?
Will you believe women when they tell you something happened?
Will you teach your sons that consent is not negotiable?
Will you teach them that rejection is survivable?
Will you teach them that women are human beings rather than rewards?
Will you teach them that anger is an emotion, not a licence?
Will you teach them that strength is not the ability to make another person afraid of you?

Because that last one matters. Are you man enough to raise your own son and show your peers the basics of being a man? If you shy away from the conversation then you are nothing more than a coward. Complacent in their actions. You in fact, are an enabler.

Ever notice how women have been given an enormous catalogue of safety instructions?

1. Don’t walk alone.
2. Don’t drink too much.
3. Don’t get into strangers’ cars.
4. Share your location.
5. Carry pepper spray.
6. Watch your surroundings.
7. Don’t trust him too quickly.

At some point, we need to ask:

Why is the person at risk being given the operating manual for avoiding the perpetrator?

And if that sounds like an unreasonable question, then perhaps we have become so accustomed to women’s fear that we no longer recognise what freedom actually looks like. The aim is not for women to become better at surviving men.

The question is not:

“What could she have done differently?”

The question is:

“Why did he believe he had the right to do it?”

And until there is an uprise to act on these issues instead of merely addressing them, unfortunately the violence, assault and murders has no end in sight.

Women should not have to organise their entire lives around the possibility that a man might decide that her freedom is an inconvenience or her body is his to do as he pleases.

She should be safe because she is a human being.
That should be enough.
Not because she deserves your protection.