The danger is not only the violence itself. It is what happens when the possibility of violence becomes part of every ordinary decision a South African woman makes in her everyday life.
Do I run here or somewhere else? Should I share my location? Is this street safe after dark? Who knows where I am? Should I take the lift, the Uber or wait for someone I know?
For millions of South African women, fear has become a form of daily mental labour.
The discovery of nine women’s bodies in Ekurhuleni has brought that reality into sharp focus. Four of the nine women have been identified: Itumeleng Kekana, 32, Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, 38, Dineo Evelyn Motapane, 38 and Gracious Nkomo, 28. Five still remain unidentified.
As investigators work to establish what happened to the women and whether any of the cases are connected, psychologists and researchers say the effects extend far beyond the immediate horror of the deaths.
Women learn to anticipate danger before it happens. They change routes, restrict where they go, check who is around them and warn other women to do the same.
The result is a life quietly reorganised around the possibility of violence.
And that, experts say, comes with a psychological cost that rarely appears in crime statistics.
Gorata Chengeta, a sexual violence researcher and PhD candidate at Wits University, told The National the fear is not an occasional reaction to a dangerous event. It has become part of how many women navigate everyday life.
"Women have to plan their entire lives around the fear of violence because we are constantly reminded of it. We are always on high alert, forced to live in survival mode.
"We share our live locations the moment we get into an Uber, we jog in big groups just to feel safe, and we never stop checking our rear-view mirrors."
That vigilance comes at a cost, she says.
“The fact that women have to limit where they go and constantly watch their own and each other's backs takes an exhausting amount of work. It completely destroys the idea that we have a right to safety,” Chengeta argues.
This constant terror, she says, is what researcher Pumla Dineo Gqola calls the "Female Fear Factory". It acts like an assembly line that produces non-stop fear, forcing women to shrink their lives into smaller and smaller spaces just to stay alive.
Even inside their own homes, a woman's mind is never truly at peace.
The numbers behind the fear
The fear is not being generated by isolated incidents.
South Africa’s first national gender-based violence study found that 35.5% of women aged 18 and older had experienced physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. That is more than one in three women.
The same study found that 33.1% had experienced physical violence and 9.8% had experienced sexual violence.
The latest police figures show that the violence continues to be reported on a massive scale.
Between April and June this year, 9,201 rapes were reported to police. Women and children accounted for 8,814 of those victims. A further 11,532 sexual offences were recorded during the quarter.
Those numbers cannot measure the fear that never results in a police report. But they help explain why vigilance has become so deeply embedded in women's everyday lives.
The threat does not have to materialise every time for it to change behaviour. It only has to remain credible, say psychologists.
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The bureaucracy of abandonment
Activists and commentators have criticised the gap between the national disaster declaration on gender-based violence and what women experience in their daily lives.
"When the president officially stands up and calls gender-based violence a national disaster, it feels like a hollow public relations stunt, says Dr Lentsu Nchabeleng, deputy director of the Gender Equality and Anti-Discrimination Unit at the University of the Free State.
"Out on the streets, women aren't seeing a single piece of real evidence that anyone is actually coming to save them."
Nchabeleng says when there is a lack of bureaucratic recognition from the state "it is a form of communication. They are communicating to both the perpetrators and the victims. To the victims, they say: you are on your own".
"To the perpetrators, the silence says: you can do as you please, and you will not be held accountable."
Melandri Constant, a narrative researcher and lay counsellor with Culture Hack Labs and the Senzekile Counselling and Training Institute (S-CTI), points directly to the crisis in Ekurhuleni as an investigative failure.
"The urgency needs to sit with the people whose job it is to catch whoever is doing this, not with women being told to change their routines again," she told The National.
The exhausting "script" of survival
This abandonment - women being left to their own resources to protect themselves - forces women to follow an exhausting daily survival script, says Constant, explaining how this dynamic creates a massive gap between the everyday experiences of men and women.
"Men don't usually have to verify dates, and they don't carry the same fear about visiting a new partner's home for the first time. Most men are simply excited, whereas women have to stay far more alert because intimate partner violence is so common."
“Even a workout widens the chasm of vulnerability. A woman jogging or walking to the gym has to factor in the possibility of encountering a stranger who means her harm in a way most men don't."
Jogini Packery, a counselling psychologist and campus head at the South African College of Applied Psychology (SACAP), told The National, that psychologically, "carrying that fear requires an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy. When women constantly feel unsafe, that sensed danger forces them to change their daily routes, avoid public spaces, and ultimately pulls them away from participating fully in public life".
“What concerns me is that we can begin to normalise this burden. We teach women increasingly sophisticated ways of avoiding becoming victims, while asking far less frequently why ordinary spaces are not safe enough for women to occupy freely.”
This heavy mental burden starts early in childhood. During 2025 and 2026, the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund's Girl Power Project spoke with more than 17 000 women and girls.
Young girls shared stories of unsafe streets, harassment, and abuse online. From a very young age, girls learn to change their routes and limit where they go. They understand danger and risk with a maturity that no child should ever have to possess.
And when harm occurs, society immediately scrutinises the victim's choices.
A decade of screams
The anger overflowing today is not a sudden, random outburst. As activist Brent Lindeque shared on Facebook, we are witnessing the breaking point after 10 long years of South African women screaming to be heard.
“They have marched, protested, stood outside Parliament, shut down universities, and taken to the streets.”
"There was #RememberKhwezi, #TotalShutdown, #AmINext, and #WomenForChange. Just last year, more than a million people signed a petition demanding that GBV be declared a National Disaster.
"Women stopped working, stopped spending, turned profile pictures purple, and lay down in public spaces, using their own bodies to represent the murdered. The state responds with empty promises, leaving women to carry a heavy whisper network just to survive," said Lindeque.
Chengeta adds: "What women's rage reveals at this moment in time is that femicide and other forms of gender-based violence are not once-off events and should not be treated as such.
"The same way, fear of violence accumulates in our bodies, so do our experiences of violence themselves.
"We are not only angry that (nine) women have been murdered recently. We are angry because we know that thousands of women have been murdered in our lifetimes.
"We are tired of going to vigils. We are tired of seeing people we love going viral as hashtags because they were murdered.
"It’s a lifetime of anger, and a fear that we will live in an endless loop of femicide headlines for the rest of our lives.
"We are watching the horror constantly unfold, while politicians promise us reforms and then disappear before any meaningful implementation happens.
"The repetition of all of this - the warnings, the murders, the headlines, the protests against GBV and then the empty promises - has exhausted us," says Chengeta.
Cwayita Mahamba, a South African mother spoke to The National with a weariness that echoes across millions of households.
"In a world where fathers have become predators, brothers perverts, and uncles pedophiles, women are left having to be protectors and protesters.
"The friend who says, 'I'm on my way home; please watch my live location' because so many like her haven't reached their destination. The young lady who checks the doors and windows countless times because there's always a lingering feeling of unsafety.
"I warn the girl next to me because I'm still here," Mahamba explains. "Unlike the girl who went to the post office, the woman who went for a run, and the lady who took an Uber. They stopped protecting us and started hunting us. Sadly, even vigilance is insurmountable. We're being forced into paranoia."
Until the burden of safety shifts from the potential victims to the culture that breeds perpetrators, South African women will remain trapped in survival mode.
Nchabeleng emphasises that systemic change requires fundamentally changing how boys are raised: "Decentering the boy child means refusing to construct boy children as superior to girl children. That’s where it starts. We must actively teach boys how to exercise power responsibly and understand that true masculinity is entirely compatible with care, vulnerability, and accountability."
Chengeta sums it up: "Our anger is us fighting to have lives that are ours and that are worth living. Anger is a demand for 'freedom' to actually mean something real."
UPDATED: September 18, 2026, 9.10am
vuyile.madwantsi@nationalmg.co.za