Eleven bodies in Ekurhuleni. A few days later, a presidential address on Heritage Day, calling gender-based violence “a national shame”.
A radio phone-in the same week with men insisting, one after another, that they personally were not the problem. South Africa has spent September, like every month before it, responding to gender-based violence at the point where it has already turned fatal. Let’s take a few steps back.
Instead of looking at the problem only after it has resulted in a fatality, we should be asking where these boys learned that this was okay – that violence towards a girl, a woman, or anyone else, was allowed. Research on convicted rapists in South Africa found that three-quarters of male perpetrators committed their first assault before the age of 20, at an average age of 17. The violent attitudes and behaviour behind what we are seeing unfold in Ekurhuleni, and other daily instances of GBV, were largely set while these men were still at school.
For readers outside South Africa, it is worth taking a moment to really look at the country’s gender-based violence statistics. More than 36% of South African women report having experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the country’s first national GBV prevalence study, released in 2024. Police recorded 54,040 sexual offence cases in a single year, an average of 148 a day. And in a 2021 survey, 76% of South African men (three in four) admitted to having committed gender-based violence at some point in their lives. That is not a fringe statistic about a violent minority. It is most men, self-reporting.
What is lacking
Although one can appreciate President Cyril Ramaphosa admitting publicly that the country has a gender-based violence issue (more like crisis or epidemic), what seems to be lacking is concrete efforts to address the problem, and South African women are growing increasingly impatient.
Let me draw your attention to other countries, where governments with far smaller GBV crises than South Africa’s have stopped waiting and built the intervention to reach communities earlier – earlier than the courts, earlier than the shelters, earlier than the femicide statistics. Other countries have started in schools, and it works.
Take Sierra Leone as an example, where a whole-school programme run across 200 schools between 2023 and 2024 included training teachers and school leaders, building reporting systems, and running age-appropriate lessons on gender-based violence. This resulted in the decrease of the number of students experiencing sexual violence from 85% to 52%, decreased support for corporal punishment from 51% to 17%, and produced a five-fold increase in positive gender attitudes among students, from 5% to 27%.
In Zimbabwe, a similar whole-school approach brought teachers, school heads and students together to build a shared plan for preventing violence; awareness of the laws protecting women and girls rose from 46% to 61% among teachers and learners.
And in Mozambique, using a cascade-training model, district officials training school leaders, who trained teachers and students in turn, ran school clubs where learners learned to recognise abuse and report it; afterwards, every student surveyed could name at least two or three ways to report violence, up from having no clear reporting channel at all. This is not a hypothetical fix, and South Africa can learn from its neighbours.
School-Related Gender-Based Violence
In 2016, Unesco and UN Women named this problem School-Related Gender-Based Violence – violence “occurring in and around schools, perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes, and enforced by unequal power dynamics”. South Africa’s own National School Safety Framework doesn’t name gender as a driver at all. A 2025 study of nearly 350 high school learners in Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal found that just over half had experienced GBV, with no statistical link to gender, but rates don’t capture mechanism.
Fieldwork by Lorretta Mayeza and Deevia Bhana shows what that mechanism looks like: boys gazing at and gossiping about girls, girls coerced into relationships and beaten for refusing, “slut” accusations over appearance. A 2025 Western Cape study found that these behaviours are so deeply set by age 10 to 14, that sexually active teens who’d perpetrated coercive acts often didn’t recognise them as rape. These children are unable to name the violence they’re part of.
Because it happens during learners’ formative years, GBV doesn’t stay contained to the classroom. Unaddressed, it risks becoming the template boys and girls carry into adulthood. And schools are exactly where we can ensure that the right foundation gets built: it’s where children first learn to work in teams, navigate peers, and operate in a social world beyond their own family. If that’s where they’re learning how to negotiate, cooperate and belong, and it’s also where they need to be learning that gender-based violence has no place in any of it.
None of this is an argument for South Africa to disown its own cultures. The ideas about men as providers and protectors, and women as caregivers and nurturers, is the golden thread running through the country’s many cultural and religious traditions.
This opinion piece does not hope to nullify these patriarchal ideas, nor should it dissuade the communities who have held them since the dawn of time. But there’s a difference between respecting a tradition and refusing to examine what happens when its more rigid form gets enforced through violence. That refusal has a name, and it isn’t culture; it’s denial – the same denial we heard this week from grown men on a radio phone-in, insisting they were not the problem while the country buries seven women a day.
The good news
Some positive news: none of this requires new legislation. South Africa already has the Schools Act, the Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Offences Act and a national gender-equality policy framework. Experts say the law is not the missing piece, but enforcement and classroom-level implementation are.
A study of nine gender-based violence NGOs operating across the country found that all nine focus exclusively on secondary and tertiary support, which means providing counselling, shelters and legal aid. Not one of those NGOs runs a primary prevention programme aimed at addressing the issue before it starts.
That’s the case for starting in schools, and our African neighbours show it isn’t just theory. Femicide, intimate partner violence and workplace harassment don’t begin in adulthood – they begin years earlier with behaviour that schools should help shape. Concepts like consent and what counts as sexual autonomy need to be taught as routinely as maths.
A president’s condemnation, however sincere, is not a plan. What’s missing is an institutional target early enough to change the next generation’s numbers, not just mourning this generation’s losses.
The classroom is that target, and elsewhere it’s already working. DM
Isel van Zyl is a researcher and project manager specialising in violent extremism, conflict, and human security.
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