Part of my job is connecting disparate social issues to infrastructure to explore the full scope of how infrastructure pushes and pulls on South Africa’s wider socioeconomic issues.

As events unfolded in Kempton Park, where the bodies of several assaulted and murdered women were discovered, I felt angry and deeply saddened by the reality facing South African women. At first, however, I did not connect these crimes to infrastructure. A short reel on social media by digital creator Lethabo Maluke (lethabomaluke24 on TikTok) highlighted that these murders are aided and abetted by political failures to keep infrastructure working in South Africa.

This might seem odd at first glance, but with a little introspection, this makes perfect, cruel sense. Predators use their surroundings to camouflage, hide, and trap their prey. The predators that commit these crimes against women also use their surroundings. The broken streetlight that keeps them under cover, the long, unkempt municipal grass that camouflages their movements, and the erosion of common and public spaces give way to isolated places where predators are free to do as they please.

Both Lethabo, from their reel, and I want to make this clear, and I will quote Lethabo here: “Broken infrastructure does not cause femicide; perpetrators do. But perpetrators use explicit darkness, overgrown spaces, and isolation to hide and attack.”

This is harrowingly illustrated by a report in Mail & Guardian in which a resident of the surrounding area, where a body was discovered, speaks of the sheer dread she has in crossing a field to get to work.

The failings of a country

Infrastructure has long been seen as a key preventative measure in ending Gender Based Violence (GBV). Schools that cannot adequately support their students often mean sub-par sexual education, including a lack of early intervention and targeted campaigns towards young boys. Schools without adequate sanitation mean that girls skip school when they are on their menstrual cycle, leaving them less educated and sometimes economically dependent on others, creating the necessary structural grounds for domestic abuse.

Water and sanitation as a whole play a crucial role; where water is not delivered to a household, it is often the women’s job to fetch water, again placing an extra burden on their education but also enabling isolating unsafe conditions. In communities where toilets are communal and neglected, the risk increases too.

And when a victim who undergoes abuse and assault relies on the state for justice and healthcare, they are failed again. A media statement from Parliament highlights that the South African Police Force are woefully unable to handle GBV cases, sometimes due to lack of resources, other times due to poor policing and non-compliance, and others because the police themselves are dismissive of GBV and perpetrators themselves. In 2022, a 17-year-old domestic violence victim was raped by Thembalethu Gqeku, the police officer who was handling her case.

Advocacy groups such as the Commission for Gender Equality suggest prioritising GBV-specific units and training for police to adequately deal with the scale of GBV in South Africa.

Victims are also failed by healthcare infrastructure, with South Africa underfunding the sector. Only 3% of the health care budget is spent on infrastructure. This leads to overcrowding, high patient-to-doctor ratios, exacerbated by insufficient staff training. There is also a woeful neglect of mental health care in public faciltiies, where victims need access to psychologists and psychiatrists.

Fixing infrastructure, ensuring that politicians are held accountable for their inaction, and investing in education, healthcare and policing will go a long way in fighting GBV. Ensuring victims are able to get justice and preventing the number of victims.

This is of course only one part of the solution, as men, who are predominantly the perpetrators, need to come together and act against those who commit GBV. GBV has infrastructural causes, economic causes, but also social causes, and they all need addressing if South Africa is to seriously tackle GBV.