By the time this goes to print, the number may have changed again. As I write, at least nine, possibly 10, women have been found dead in and around Kempton Park since mid-July, most half-naked, several with visible bruising, left along the same stretch of the R21 and its surrounding veld.
Dr Vedhna Dayanand-Lalla is a senior lecturer in the subject group Social Work at the NWU.
Opinion piece by Dr Vedhna Dayanand-Lalla, senior lecturer in the subject group Social Work
Police have not confirmed a serial killer, but they have confirmed something almost as chilling: concerning similarities across the deaths. Among them is Elizabeth "Tsontso" Moselakgomo, 38, who disappeared while out on a run and whose case only drew wide attention after fellow runners campaigned to find her.
Amnesty International called it another brutal confirmation that women in South Africa remain unsafe. Women are again being told to move in groups and stay vigilant, as if the burden of prevention belongs to the women who might be killed, not the society that keeps producing the men who kill them.
There is a useful vocabulary here: the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, which measures justice not by output but by whether people have the real freedom to do and be what they value, to move safely, work, care for others.
Gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) is a textbook capability violation: a woman who is constrained from running at 04:00 without fear has had her freedom narrowed by force, regardless of what the Constitution promises on paper. The presence of opportunity does not prove the presence of freedom.
Predictably, marches are being planned again. Silent marches, candlelight marches, placards with names, symbolic black clothing. They will happen, as they always do, and the next time this happens we will all be reading about a different town, a different name.
I do not say this to mock the instinct. When violence this random feels entirely outside your control, marching is one of the only things left that still feels like doing something. It converts helplessness into something somewhat comforting. That comfort is real and should be begrudged.
But comfort is not change. A march does not restructure a budget line or a promotion criterion. It does not reach the under-resourced South African Police Services unit, the stalled docket, or the institution quietly telling a woman her unpaid care work does not count towards her worth. Marches are loudest where our power is weakest: the street, after the fact, and quietest where it is strongest: the boardrooms and budget committees that actually set the rules women live and work by and are protected under. If this energy has nowhere sturdier to land, it repeats itself, name after name. Universities, with their outsized claim to moral leadership, should be first in line to give it somewhere to land, not last.
Which brings me to the university itself. It is tempting to treat GBVF as happening in a separate register from institutional life, while universities host panels and issue statements, imagining themselves above it. They are not above it. They are a microcosm of it. Research on South African higher education repeatedly finds women academics carrying heavier teaching loads, thinner mentorship, and cultures that treat caregiving as a private inconvenience.
Women remain less likely to reach tenure than men, even once output is taken into account. This shows a structure never built with women's full lives in mind. None of that is violence the way Kempton Park is violence, and I will not collapse the two. But they share a root: measuring a woman's value while stripping out the context of her life, treating her care work as a liability. That is the same devaluation, in gentler dress, that underlies the quieter forms of GBV that precede the fatal ones.
That critique surfaced this week on Radio 702, when John Perlman asked acting police minister Firoz Cachalia almost the same question I would ask a university: what does the heavy police presence actually change once the cameras thin out? Performative policing and performative institutional allyship are the same gesture in different uniforms; both offer urgency when it is cheap and evaporate when structural follow-through is actually required.
So, what would real action look like beyond knowledge-based activities? A trauma-informed GBV office with dedicated case managers, not a monitored mailbox. A campus audited and fixed for safety every year, not once after an incident. A permanent, ring-fenced budget line that survives leadership changes. Annual public reporting on GBV cases and outcomes. Independent investigation of complaints against staff. Automatic, opt-out tenure-clock extensions for caregiving. The test is simple: does it cost the institution something, or create accountability it cannot quietly walk back?
This is not hypothetical. The Vanderbijlpark Campus of the North-West University (NWU) has established a dedicated GBVF Empowerment Centre, trauma-informed support and survivor-centred reporting, backed by Council policy. If this model exists at one South African university, the excuse that it is too expensive or too far outside the mandate of a university falls away for the rest.
South African women understand, with brutal intimacy, what the fear of being attacked feels like. They carry it on runs, on the walk to a taxi rank, in an evening lecture theatre in winter. If gender responsiveness is going to mean more than a banner and a hashtag, it has to become an audit of whose capabilities the institution is protecting, and whose it is quietly narrowing, because a university that cannot make room for the fullness of a woman's life is not neutral. It is rehearsing the same lesson the streets already teach: that a woman's worth and her safety are conditional. Kempton Park should make it impossible to keep pretending otherwise.
