There is a particular psychological burden attached to being a woman in South Africa that is difficult to explain to someone who has never had to carry it.
It is the burden of anticipation.
Before I enter a parking lot, I assess my surroundings. Before I walk to my car, I look behind me. When I am travelling, I consider who knows where I am. When I meet someone unfamiliar, I instinctively evaluate whether I am safe. When I am alone, I am rarely simply alone. I am calculating.
These calculations have become so deeply embedded in the lives of South African women that we have almost stopped recognising them as evidence of a national crisis.
We call it being careful. We call it common sense. We call it being responsible.
But there is another way to understand it.
It is what happens when an entire category of citizens is socialised into anticipating violence.
The recent reports of women being found dead in Kempton Park and the resulting fears that a serial offender may be operating in the area, have understandably generated anxiety. Whether the deaths are ultimately established to be connected is a matter for the investigation and it would be irresponsible to reach conclusions before the evidence warrants them.
But the fear itself requires no further investigation.
South African women already know what it means to wonder whether the person standing behind them intends them harm.
That is the deeper issue.
The national conversation about femicide often becomes concentrated around individual cases, individual perpetrators and individual acts of extraordinary brutality. Those cases deserve our attention, our outrage and, above all, justice.
But if we limit our analysis to the individual perpetrator, we risk misunderstanding the scale of the problem.
Femicide is not merely the story of one man killing one woman.
It is also a story about the conditions that make violence against women persistent, about the institutions responsible for preventing and responding to that violence, about social attitudes that continue to reproduce gender inequality and about the ways in which women themselves have been forced to adapt to an environment they did not create.
This is why I struggle when conversations about women's safety inevitably become conversations about women's behaviour.
Do not walk alone. Do not go out late. Do not accept a lift. Do not drink too much. Share your location. Carry your keys between your fingers. Watch your surroundings. Tell someone where you are.
There is practical value in personal safety advice. I am not dismissing it.
What concerns me is what happens when precaution becomes our principal response to violence.
Because there is a subtle but profound shift that takes place.
The question stops being, "Why are women being subjected to violence?" And becomes, "What could this woman have done differently?"
That is not prevention.
That is the individualisation of a structural problem. A woman can make every responsible decision and still encounter a violent person. She can be sober. She can be cautious. She can dress conservatively. She can share her location. She can avoid unfamiliar places.
She can do everything society has instructed her to do and still become a victim.
The existence of risk management strategies does not absolve society of the responsibility to reduce the risk itself.
And this is where our national response requires considerably greater intellectual honesty.
Gender based violence is not simply a criminal justice problem, although the criminal justice system is central to addressing it. It is simultaneously a social, economic, cultural, institutional and human rights problem. It concerns the ways in which power operates within intimate relationships. It concerns the normalisation of controlling behaviour.
It concerns attitudes towards women's autonomy. It concerns the socialisation of boys and men. It concerns whether victims are believed. It concerns whether complaints are taken seriously. It concerns whether investigations are competent and timely. It concerns whether perpetrators believe that consequences are inevitable.
And it concerns whether the state and society are capable of recognising violence before it becomes lethal.
That last point deserves particular attention.
We tend to think of femicide as beginning at the moment a woman is murdered. It does not.
For many victims, lethal violence exists at the end of a continuum that may include intimidation, coercive control, stalking, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence and threats.
By the time a woman's body is found, the violence may have been present in her life for months or years.
The murder is the final manifestation.
The warning signs often came earlier.
The question we should therefore be asking is not only why women are being killed.
It is why the systems surrounding them so frequently fail to interrupt the trajectory towards violence.
That requires accountability.
Not performative outrage. Not another campaign that disappears from public consciousness after the next news cycle. Not another reminder to women to be careful.
Accountability.
We need institutions capable of identifying patterns across cases rather than treating each woman's death as an isolated tragedy. We need effective investigation. We need appropriate victim support. We need credible prosecution. We need communities willing to intervene when warning signs emerge.
We need men willing to confront misogyny within their own social environments rather than assuming that violence against women is exclusively the responsibility of "bad men". And we need political leadership that recognises that a crisis of this magnitude requires sustained institutional attention rather than episodic responses driven by public outrage.
But there is another dimension of this crisis that deserves greater recognition: the psychological consequences of living with the possibility of violence.
A woman does not need to be attacked to have her life altered by violence. The anticipation of violence is itself consequential.
It determines when she travels.
Where she goes. Who she trusts. How long she stays out. Whether she accepts an invitation. Whether she takes a particular route home.
Whether she feels comfortable living alone. Whether she allows herself the freedom to be spontaneous.
That is significant because freedom is not merely the absence of physical restraint.
Freedom also requires the reasonable expectation that one can participate in society without constantly calculating the possibility of harm.
When women routinely modify their lives because they anticipate violence, the consequences extend beyond individual fear.
Women's access to public life is diminished. Their mobility is constrained.
Their economic participation can be affected.
Their social relationships are influenced.
Their sense of autonomy is eroded. Fear therefore becomes more than an emotion.
It becomes a social force.
And perhaps this is why the language of "normal" concerns me so deeply.
We should never become comfortable with a society in which women have developed sophisticated survival strategies simply because those strategies have become necessary.
Adaptation is not evidence that a problem has been solved.
Sometimes it is evidence that people have been forced to live with the problem for too long. I love South Africa.
That is precisely why I find this conversation so difficult.
Criticising our country's failures does not mean rejecting the country itself. On the contrary, it reflects a belief that South Africa can and must do better.
I want to live in a country where a woman can walk to her car without having to scan the environment first.
Where being alone does not automatically mean being vulnerable.
Where a daughter leaving the house does not require her mother to calculate every possible danger between the front door and her safe return.
Where women are not routinely taught that their safety depends primarily on their ability to anticipate the behaviour of violent men.
I do not want fear to become an inherited component of womanhood.
I do not want younger women to regard my generation's precautions as simply the natural conditions of being female.
And I certainly do not want us to reach a point where another murdered woman produces nothing more than another week of outrage, another series of headlines and another set of safety tips for women.
We should be asking more difficult questions.
What does the persistence of femicide reveal about our institutions?
What does it reveal about our communities?
What does it reveal about how we understand masculinity, power and entitlement? What does it reveal about the effectiveness of our interventions?
And what would it take to make women genuinely safer rather than simply more vigilant?
These questions are uncomfortable because they demand that responsibility move beyond the individual.
They require us to examine ourselves collectively. They require men to participate in prevention. They require institutions to be held accountable.
They require communities to reject silence.
And they require the government to treat violence against women not as an unfortunate feature of South African life, but as a fundamental threat to the rights, dignity and freedom of millions of citizens.
I am not asking for a South Africa without risk.
No society can promise that.
I am asking for a society in which women are not expected to carry the disproportionate burden of managing that risk.
Because there is a difference between telling women how to survive and building a society in which they do not have to spend their lives preparing to survive.
As a South African woman, I want the latter.
Not because I believe my safety should be guaranteed at every moment.
But because I believe that my freedom should not be quietly negotiated against the possibility of violence.
I should not have to be exceptionally vigilant simply to experience an ordinary life. Neither should any other woman.
And perhaps that is the standard by which we should judge ourselves.
Not by how effectively women have learned to protect themselves.
But by whether we have created a society in which they increasingly have less reason to believe they must.
Jodene Minnie Louw is a South African communications professional, author and emerging educator. She is a published author and has contributed as a co-author to two publications. She is also the author of her recently published memoir, My Beautiful Box of Regrets: The Solo Marriage, a reflective work that examines personal experience, relationships, resilience and self-discovery.