It’s quite the contrast working at Action Society. On a daily basis we work with women and families in communities where gender-based violence is not an abstract social problem very much immediate and frightening. We go to their homes and sit in our dysfunctional courts to follow cases through a criminal justice system that is at its weakest and worst precisely when victims need it to be at its strongest.
And then, from those homes and communities, you move into the policy world of conferences, strategies, task teams, implementation frameworks and carefully worded commitments. The distance between the two can be staggering.
That experience changes the way you think about South Africa’s GBV crisis.
As with many of the ills plaguing our country, we do not lack plans to address those ills. When it comes to GBV, we have legislation, strategies, summits, task teams and the National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. More than enough paper talking about the problem.
Nor is our problem that South Africans are unaware of GBV. We are painfully aware of it.
The HSRC’s first national GBV study found that 33.1% of adult women had experienced physical violence in their lifetime, while 9.8% had experienced sexual violence. More than 7.8 million women were estimated to have experienced physical or sexual violence.
We should learn lessons from countries that translated their talk into doing and have turned the tide against GBV. What have countries that actually reduced violence against women done differently?
Nicaragua
We start in the unlikely Central American country of Nicaragua, which is not an obvious success story.
In León, researchers found in 1995 that 54.8% of ever-partnered women had experienced physical violence from an intimate partner. More than 28% had experienced it in the previous year.
When researchers returned in 2016, lifetime physical partner violence had fallen to 27.6%. Violence in the preceding year had fallen to 8.3%.
That is a reduction of about 70% in recent physical intimate-partner violence. The researchers controlled for demographic changes and concluded that the decline was real, although they were careful not to pretend that one policy alone caused it.
What happened in between the two reports matters.
Laws indeed changed. Women’s organisations pushed the issue into public life (something that is thankfully already in full swing in South Africa). Thereafter, victims gained better access to services and justice while specialist police structures were developed. And civil society worked on social norms and women’s knowledge of their rights through awareness.
In other words, the country did not choose between prevention and enforcement. It worked on both.
That should already tell us something about the South African debate, which too often becomes trapped between two policy camps. One argues that GBV is fundamentally about patriarchy, social norms and inequality. The other argues for more effective policing and prosecution.
Both are right, but neither is sufficient.
You can teach boys and young men about consent and healthy relationships. You should. But when a known repeat offender violates a protection order and nothing happens, the state is teaching a lesson of its own. It is teaching him that consequences are negotiable.
Philippines
The Philippines offers a second lesson.
In its 2008 national demographic and health survey, 29% of ever-married women reported physical, sexual or emotional violence by a husband or partner. By 2022 that had fallen to 18%, and the 2025 national survey recorded a further decline to 15.4% among women who had ever had a husband or intimate partner.
Again, one should be cautious about claiming that a particular government programme "caused" the decline. GBV data are difficult to compare and report behaviour changes over time.
But one feature of the Philippine system is particularly relevant to South Africa. Its response was pushed down to community level.
Under Philippine law, local barangays (the country’s smallest units of government) were required to establish help desks specifically dealing with violence against women. These local structures assist victims, record cases, facilitate protection measures and connect them with police, social workers and other services.
The basic idea is that a victim should not have to navigate an entire state bureaucracy before she reaches someone responsible for helping her. In South Africa our vulnerable women know far too well how bureaucracy fails them, while creating the sense that something is being done when in reality nothing is.
Regrettably, in South Africa discussions about which sphere of government should exercise which powers quickly become politically loaded. Our political and policy leaders and our commentators are failing victims of GBV while performatively obsessing over these polemical debates as victims continue to suffer. GBV victims do not care about constitutional turf wars.
We need to become far more comfortable with allowing capable institutions closer to communities to solve problems rather than assuming every solution must be designed, controlled and standardised from Pretoria.
The national government plainly has an indispensable role. It must legislate, fund institutions, set minimum standards and ensure that constitutional rights mean the same thing everywhere. But that does not mean every useful intervention must be centrally run.
For us at Action Society, the point is not bureaucratic decentralisation for its own sake. But governments closer to the people are more accountable to the people. When responsibility is spread across five departments and three spheres of government, everyone can explain why someone else failed.
When responsibility is clear and close to the victim, failure becomes harder to hide.
Conclusion
Countries that have made progress against GBV destroy the fatalistic idea that extremely high levels of violence are simply something societies must learn to live with. They can be reduced. Decline in South Africa is not inevitable.
The difficult part is that the solution is less dramatic than the political rhetoric surrounding GBV. It requires basics. And it requires politicians obsessed with getting the basics right.
None of that fits neatly on a poster. But recent IRR polling suggests that the abuse of women and children is now the second most important political issue for women in South Africa, behind only unemployment. Women rank it ahead of corruption, electricity, housing and illegal immigration.
That should change the political conversation. GBV is not a niche concern to be dusted off for Women’s Month or 16 Days of Activism. It is a bread-and-butter issue for millions of South African women who want to know whether the state will protect them when they are most vulnerable.
It is therefore quite striking that, in a local government election year, there is so little political competition over who can make communities safer for women and children.
Local governments do not control SAPS, the NPA or the courts. But that should not become an excuse for passivity. Municipalities that have the capacity should be willing to push the boundaries of their mandate: build stronger victim-support networks, improve coordination with shelters and NGOs, use municipal law enforcement more effectively, make dangerous public spaces safer, and create practical local systems that help victims reach the right institution quickly.
Some DA-led governments have already begun pushing at these boundaries and under Geordin Hill-Lewis the party has made stronger policing and greater local crime-fighting powers a prominent part of its 2026 local government campaign. In Cape Town, this has included a proposal for a metro police detective capacity to investigate serious crimes and build better cases for prosecution.
But the IRR polling suggests there is a much bigger political opportunity here. The ANC still leads the DA among women by 37% to 26%, compared with an almost dead heat among men at 27% to 26%. The IRR argues that women place particular political weight on the security of their households and dependants, and that the party able to combine economic opportunity with credible household security could break into one of the ANC’s most important remaining electoral advantages.
So if the DA or any other party wants to win women away from the ANC, GBV should not disappear inside a broader message about crime. It should be a specific political offer. That would win votes.
Juanita du Preez is the national spokesperson for Action Society