What the Murder of Women Reveals About the World We Have Made

Eight women’s bodies have now been found in Ekurhuleni, and the police have told women to ‘be vigilant’. Women keep returning to those words because they are an assault on the value of our personhood. We hardly need to be taught vigilance. Most of us have been learning it all our lives. We know the small calculations that accompany our movement through the world: where to park, which road to take, whether to walk the last few metres, whether it is too late to run, or if we can run at all, whether to wear headphones, whether the man behind us has been there for too long, whether to send our location, whether someone should know when we arrive. We do these things so routinely that much of the time we no longer experience them as restrictions on our freedom. They have been absorbed into our everyday lives and normalised as part of what it means to move through the world as a woman. At a fundamental level we are not free and, at an equally fundamental level, those who run our society do not take this as a crisis. It is, in a different kind of way, also normal for them.

Then there are moments when violence becomes spectacular enough to rupture this shared normality. A woman goes for a run and does not come home. A body is discovered, and then others. Fear spreads because something that women have learnt to carry individually is suddenly experienced collectively, moving through conversations between women, through families and friendship groups, and beginning to shape even the most ordinary decisions about how we move through the city. But these moments do not introduce violence into an otherwise peaceful social world. Their terrible power lies partly in the fact that they expose what was already there. The spectacular act illuminates, for a moment, the largely invisible system of calculations, restrictions and accommodations through which women ordinarily negotiate the relentless risk of violence.

There is a long history behind this, but it is not a single history of an abstract category called ‘women’. One of the most important achievements of Black, Marxist, postcolonial and anti-caste feminism has been to show that gendered violence cannot be separated from the histories through which human beings have been organised by property, class, race, caste, slavery and colonial power. Nor should rape, assault, reproductive coercion and killing be treated as though each belongs to an entirely separate history. They are distinct forms of violence and must remain analytically distinct, but they can operate within the same structures of power over women’s bodies, labour and freedom. Again and again, violence against women has done political and economic work: enforcing boundaries, disciplining labour and sexuality, punishing transgression, reproducing hierarchies and helping to determine whose bodily autonomy is protected and whose can be violated.

This is part of what Silvia Federici forces us to reconsider in the history of capitalism. Marx’s account of primitive accumulation – better translated as ‘original accumulation’ – describes the enormous violence through which people were separated from land and means of subsistence and compelled to survive through wage labour. Federici asks what that history looks like when the production and reproduction of labour itself is brought into view. From that perspective, enclosure and dispossession cannot be separated from transformations in household authority, sexuality, reproduction and the division of labour between women and men. In her account, the European witch hunts belong within this history not simply because women were subjected to extraordinary terror, but because the persecution of women was implicated in a wider transformation of women’s social position, reproductive capacities and labour. What would later be presented as natural difference – men associated with productive and increasingly waged labour, women with reproductive and increasingly devalued labour – was historically produced and enforced.

Violence does not simply occur after social relations have been constituted; it can participate in making and reproducing those relations. We can also begin to understand why the threat of violence matters politically even when violence is not inflicted upon every member of the group being disciplined. A boundary does not need to be violently enforced against every person every day for people to learn where that boundary lies. Violence can also be a form of oppressive pedagogy. An attack on one person is a lesson to others.

But the history of capitalism cannot be understood through the experience of European women alone. The accumulation Federici is concerned with was inseparable from slavery and colonial conquest, and those histories force us to confront very different relationships between women, labour and violence. Angela Davis begins here. In Women, Race & Class, the experience of enslaved Black women is shown to make any account of ‘women’s oppression’ that treats women as though they occupied a common relationship to labour, patriarchy or even womanhood itself at best inadequate and at worst complicit with racism.

Enslaved women were subjected to the violence of slavery as labourers while also encountering forms of domination directed specifically at them as women. Forced labour, physical punishment, sexual violence and the exploitation of reproductive capacity belonged to the same social order. Davis’s discussion of rape shows that it was not an isolated sexual violation occurring alongside slavery. It functioned as an instrument of coercion and domination within slavery itself.

Davis is particularly important because she also refuses to allow the history of sexual violence to become a simple story of violent men and female victims detached from racial power. In tracing the history beyond slavery, she examines both the sexual vulnerability of Black women and the racist mythology of the Black male rapist preying on white women that became politically powerful after emancipation. A society that could disregard sexual violence against Black women could simultaneously mobilise accusations of rape against Black men as part of racial terror. Rape, then, cannot be understood outside the political world that determines whose body is considered violable, whose testimony is credible, who can be imagined as a victim and who is constructed as a threat.

Davis’s argument also warns against treating rape, assault and femicide as self-contained phenomena with wholly separate histories. Rape is not murder, and murder is not rape. Sexual violence, physical assault, coercive control and femicide have different meanings, histories and consequences, and one does not necessarily lead to another. But Davis helps us see why the boundaries between these categories cannot become boundaries around our analysis. Different forms of violence can be produced and sustained by the same relations of power. They can enforce domination, destroy autonomy, punish resistance and establish whose bodily integrity – and thereby personhood – is socially protected and whose is not.

The history of caste violence in India makes another configuration of this relationship grimly clear. Dalit women face sexual violence from dominant-caste men, landlords and, in documented cases, police in contexts involving struggles over labour, land and political assertion. Once again sexual violence operates not only against an individual woman but also through her against a wider community. The assault carries a message about who may challenge authority and who is expected to remain in an allotted social place. It is simultaneously mediated through gender and caste, and to call it either gender or caste violence rather than both misunderstands how power is actually organised.

The colonial history of India warns us against turning violence against women into a comforting story about enlightened societies and uniquely violent others. Gayatri Spivak’s intervention around sati in Can the Subaltern Speak? remains important because she asks us to attend to the politics through which the colonised woman becomes represented. Colonial authority could construct itself as the civilised rescuer of oppressed Indian women while indigenous patriarchal authority produced its own claims around tradition. The issue is not only that nobody asked women what they thought. It is whether the subaltern woman could become legible as a political subject at all, rather than appearing primarily as the object through which competing forms of authority speak.

This remains an important warning when we discuss gendered violence in formerly colonised societies. Colonialism cannot be allowed to disappear from the analysis, but neither can it become an alibi for patriarchy. Racism cannot be confronted by denying violence against women, and violence against women cannot be confronted by resurrecting the colonial fantasy of the uniquely violent African or Indian man. A serious feminism has to hold these histories together without allowing one to erase another.

The 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in Delhi brought some of these questions into public life with extraordinary force. She was a 23-year-old physiotherapy student travelling home after an evening at the cinema when she was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on a private bus. She later died from her injuries. The violence inflicted upon her produced enormous protests across India and international attention, but the political resonance of the case extended beyond the horror of what happened to one young woman. Millions of women recognised the ordinary world surrounding the extraordinary violence: an evening out, a bus journey, the expectation that a woman should be able to travel through a city and return home alive.

The extremity of the violence drew attention to a more everyday reality: the constant limits placed on women’s ability to move freely through public space. Yet here too we must resist allowing one spectacular case to stand in for the lives of all Indian women. Caste, class, geography and social status profoundly shape both exposure to violence and whose suffering becomes nationally visible. The history of sexual violence against Dalit women, which usually does not receive anything like the same national attention, reminds us that even public recognition of violence is unequally distributed.

In Africa colonial rule did not simply arrive and place racial domination on top of a pre-existing and unchanging African patriarchy. Colonial conquest transformed access to land, labour, marriage, household authority, mobility and political power, and these transformations were themselves gendered. In colonial Natal, interventions into African marriage, lobola and household organisation became entangled with wider struggles over authority, labour and social reproduction. Across southern Africa, land dispossession, taxation and migrant labour reorganised households and the material conditions through which African communities reproduced themselves. Women negotiated these transformations, resisted them and repeatedly entered political struggles precisely where state and economic power reached into everyday life.

South Africa does not arrive at its present crisis of violence without a history. Colonial conquest, racial capitalism, land dispossession, migrant labour and apartheid reorganised where people lived, who owned property, how families survived, who moved and who remained behind, and how labour was reproduced across generations. Apartheid geography did not disappear in 1994, and neither did the extraordinary inequalities produced through these histories, or the willingness of the state to govern some people with violence, and to abandon certain categories of people in social terms. But history cannot become an alibi either. To locate contemporary gendered violence within this history is not to make Black men pathological products of colonialism, nor to claim that poverty causes rape or murder. It is to ask how violence becomes possible and normalised within a social order produced and sustained by violence and structured by profound inequalities of power.

Pumla Dineo Gqola’s indispensable work, especially Rape: A South African Nightmare, rejects the treatment of rape as a succession of isolated acts committed by aberrant individuals. In the chapter ‘A recurring nightmare’, she describes rape as sexualised violence and a communication of patriarchal power. She is interested in what rape communicates about power, disposability and the social meanings attached to women’s bodies. She pushes us away from treating each rape as a self-contained event towards examining the patterns and structures within which rape becomes possible and intelligible.

Gqola’s analysis of rape scripts is particularly important. Societies carry assumptions about what a ‘real’ rape looks like, what kind of woman makes a credible victim and what kind of man can be imagined as a rapist. Those scripts matter because they shape whose testimony becomes believable and whose violation can be minimised or rendered implausible. The familiar or respectable man can sit uneasily with the imagined figure of the rapist; women whose lives or behaviour fall outside conventions of innocence can struggle to be recognised as victims. Gqola is concerned with the social meanings that make gendered violence recognisable in some circumstances and obscure it in others.

Rape and femicide are not interchangeable forms of violence, and we should not make sexual violence present where the evidence does not establish it. In the current Ekurhuleni investigation, police have confirmed sexual assault in the majority of the original Kempton Park cases, but they have not established that sexual violence was involved in all eight deaths now under investigation, nor have they established that all eight deaths are connected. What we can ask, without collapsing rape into murder, is what different forms of violence against women reveal about power over women’s bodies.

Femicide takes us to lethal violence against women, while rape is sexualised violence; neither can simply be treated as a stage on an inevitable progression towards the other. But they can inhabit the same field of gendered power in which women’s bodily integrity and autonomy are made violable. In some cases, sexual and lethal violence occur together. In others they do not. The analytical connection lies in the forms of power through which women’s bodies become subject to violence.

This is especially important in South Africa because the frightening stranger in public space is only one figure in the violence women face. The most recent national femicide research by the South African Medical Research Council found that around 60 per cent of women murdered in 2020/21 were killed by their intimate partners. The spatial imagination contained in so much safety advice is often seriously detached from reality. Danger is imagined as outside and safety as inside: do not run alone, do not walk after dark. Get home and lock the door. Yet for many women the home itself is the site of violence. There is no route sufficiently well-chosen and no degree of personal vigilance capable of solving that problem.

Over the last few days, fear has extended well beyond Kempton Park and well beyond women who might ordinarily think of themselves as particularly exposed to this danger. I hear my son and his friends discussing it. Young women are talking to one another about it in their WhatsApp groups, while their male friends, lovers and family members worry about them. Parents are having the same conversations. Across Johannesburg, people who live in different places and occupy very different positions within the city’s racial and class geography recognise themselves, or somebody they love, in the possibility these deaths have opened up.

That shared fear does not mean that we are equally vulnerable. We are not. A woman waiting for transport in an unlit area and a woman driving home to a house protected by private security do not encounter the city on equal terms, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. Class buys forms of protection: cars, walls, armed response, safer transport, lawyers, alternative accommodation, and the possibility of leaving. Race, geography and employment continue to shape exposure to danger. But protection is not invulnerability. There are moments when spectacular violence punctures some of the psychological distance that privilege ordinarily allows us to maintain. We know that the circumstances of our lives differ enormously, and at the same time we all recognise the vulnerability these deaths expose.

Perhaps that is why this moment has got its hooks into so many of us. The fear extends beyond the possibility of a particular perpetrator, especially when the police themselves have not yet established that one person is responsible for all these deaths. These deaths make women recognise, in extreme form, vulnerabilities that already shape their everyday lives. The calculations described at the beginning of this essay – the route, the hour, the car, the location sent to a friend – suddenly disclose what they have always been guarding against. Spectacular violence does not create that knowledge. It gives it a body.

The social effects of violence do not depend on the perpetrator intending those effects. We do not know what the person or people responsible for these deaths intended beyond the violence itself, and we should not invent motives. But violence does not have to be consciously intended as a message to every woman in order to acquire a social life beyond its immediate victim. It travels through news reports and conversations, through warnings between friends, through parents speaking to children and through the decisions women subsequently make about their movements. Fear is one of the means by which the effects of violence travel.

That is also why the spectacular and the everyday cannot be separated, although they must never be treated as equivalent. The woman who decides not to run tomorrow has not experienced what happened to the woman who did not come home. But something has nevertheless happened to her freedom. A possibility has been removed or at least made more costly. Multiply that small contraction across millions of decisions – the walk not taken, the job declined because the journey home is unsafe, the relationship a woman cannot afford to leave, the place she will not go alone, the hour at which she no longer feels entitled to occupy the street – and what appears individually as sensible caution begins to look like a collective political condition.

The injunction to ‘be vigilant’ is, as all woman already know, always necessary but it is wholly inadequate as a response to the problem itself. The phrase places responsibility on the people who are exposed to the danger rather than on the institutions and social conditions that produce it. It asks women to become better at navigating a social order in which our freedom is already conditional. When a structural problem is repeatedly returned to individuals as something they must manage for themselves, we should ask what has disappeared from view.

The state is one of the things that disappears. Its responsibility cannot begin when a body is discovered and end when a perpetrator is arrested. A democratic state participates in producing the material conditions in which people are either able or unable to exercise their freedoms: through policing and courts, certainly, but also through public transport, housing, street lighting, labour regulation, social provision, shelters and the material possibilities available to a woman who needs to leave a violent home. In a profoundly unequal society, the retreat of public provision also means that security itself becomes increasingly commodified. Those who can afford walls, electric fences, armed response and private transport purchase degrees of insulation from public failure. Those who cannot are more exposed. Yet even the most privileged woman cannot purchase complete exemption from gendered violence, not least because so much violence occurs in intimate relationships and private spaces.

The issue is larger than crime. It concerns the actual freedom women have to live and move as they choose. South Africa’s Constitution promises everyone freedom and security of the person. But a right cannot be measured only by its existence in law. It must also be measured by the material possibility of exercising it. If women possess the formal right to move through the city but must continually restrict that movement because of the possibility of violence, then there is a distance between constitutional freedom and lived freedom that we should be unwilling to normalise.

Perhaps some of the anger we are feeling now comes from living inside that contradiction. We are frightened by what is happening in Ekurhuleni, but we are also angry because none of this is new. The constitutional promise is expansive while the freedom women are actually able to exercise remains constrained. Fear can lead us to accommodate that contradiction, to accept restrictions as necessary responses to danger; anger has the possibility of doing something different by making the restrictions themselves intolerable. The difficulty is in preventing that anger from disappearing with the particular event that brought it so forcefully to the surface.

We have seen, in South Africa and elsewhere, what can happen when shared and visible anger does not disappear. In February 2013, seventeen-year-old Anene Booysen was raped and subjected to horrific physical violence in Bredasdorp and died from her injuries. Her death produced protests and national outrage. Six years later, after the rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana, South Africa was asking versions of the same question again. The protests that followed, once again forced gender-based violence into the centre of national politics, contributing to the government’s Emergency Action Plan and the subsequent National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. Those measures have plainly not transformed the conditions of women’s lives. The mobilisation was hugely important but the unresolved question is why public pressure has produced so little material change.

Ekurhuleni forces us to ask what became of the responses we already generated. Why, after so much public anger and so many institutional commitments, does the distance between formal freedom and women’s lived freedom remain so large?

The urgent question that confronts us is political: what is to be done?