When women are murdered, our first response should not be to draw smaller maps for women to live within. It should be to confront the people and systems that make their deaths possible.
There is something deeply unsettling about the way we talk to women after another woman is killed.
A woman is murdered and almost immediately the warning arrives: Do not walk alone. Do not run alone. Do not go out at night. Do not wear headphones. Do not trust strangers. Share your location. Carry something for protection. Tell someone where you are going. Make sure someone knows when you get home.
The advice usually comes from a place of love. It is fear speaking through mothers, sisters, friends and strangers who desperately do not want another woman to disappear.
But every time another woman is killed, we seem to draw another line on the map of where women are allowed to go.
This street is unsafe. That park is unsafe. That time of night is unsafe. Do not go there alone. Do not run by yourself.
Little by little, the map becomes smaller.
And then we call it safety.
That is the uncomfortable conversation South Africa needs to have, as eight women’s bodies have been found in and around Kempton Park. Police have established a multidisciplinary task team and identified similarities between some of the cases but have cautioned that it is too early to conclude that the deaths are linked or that one perpetrator is responsible. Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, 38, who disappeared after going for a run, has been identified as one of the victims.
The horror is happening against a much larger crisis. In the first quarter of the 2026-27 financial year, 569 women were murdered in South Africa between April and June, more than six women every day. The latest Statistics South Africa crime survey also examines people’s perceptions of safety and the measures they take to protect themselves against crime. These are not merely statistics. They are measurements of how much fear has entered ordinary life.
And once again, women are being told to be careful.
Of course, women should be careful. But does our vocabulary of safety so often begin and end with instructions to women?
Why are women handed survival manuals for a problem they did not create?
There is a difference between telling someone how to navigate a dangerous environment and making that person responsible for the existence of the danger.
When a woman is murdered while running, the conversation becomes: “Do not run alone.”
When she is attacked while walking home or to school: “Do not walk there.”
When she is killed at night: “You should have been home earlier.”
The perpetrator becomes the shadow in the background while the woman is placed under a magnifying glass.
We examine her decisions, her clothes, her movements, her relationships, her location and the hour on the clock. It is as though the burden of the crime is quietly being placed inside her handbag.
Carry it carefully enough, we seem to tell women and perhaps you will survive.
But why should women have to carry the weight of somebody else’s decision to hurt them?
A woman going for a run is not an invitation to murder. A woman walking home or to school does not consent to violence. A woman being alone is not an open door.
The problem is not that women have failed to memorise enough safety rules. The problem is that someone is willing to violate another person’s most basic right: the right to live.
This is where safety can become a cage.
First, we take away the night. Then the empty street. Then the park. Then public transport. Then, travelling alone. Then going out alone. Then walking alone. Then running alone. Then going to school.
Eventually, the safest place becomes the smallest possible place.
Home.
And even home is not always safe.
What kind of freedom is that?
A society cannot keep shrinking the map and call it liberation.
Women should be able to run in their neighbourhoods. They should be able to walk home or to school, use public transport, attend a concert, visit a friend, walk late at night and travel alone. None of these activities constitutes permission to kill them.
Yet every time a woman is murdered, we renegotiate her freedom.
The more we make women’s behaviour the centre of the conversation, the more the perpetrator disappears from view.
That is precisely where our attention should not go.
The spotlight should remain on the person who committed the violence.
Who did this? Why did they believe they could do it? Were warning signs missed? Are the investigations adequately resourced? Are perpetrators being brought before the courts? Are communities equipped to respond when women disappear?
And are we teaching boys and men that another person’s body, movement and freedom are not theirs to control?
These questions are harder than telling women to carry pepper spray. They require responsibility rather than ritual.
Women have been adapting to danger for generations.
We share our locations. We call when we arrive. We avoid certain streets. We walk faster when footsteps approach from behind. We pretend to be on the phone. We check the back seat. We send “I’m home” messages.
We have become cartographers of danger, constantly redrawing our routes around the possibility of violence.
And still, women are murdered.
At some point, we must stop asking women to become better navigators of a violent society and start asking why the society remains so violent.
This does not mean safety advice is useless. It means we must put it in its proper place.
Telling women how to reduce their exposure to danger can be an immediate harm-reduction measure. It should never become a substitute for preventing the violence itself.
There is a profound difference between saying, “Please be careful because we want you alive,” and creating a society in which women are expected to organise their entire lives around men’s potential violence.
The first is care.
The second is containment.
And women know the difference.
That is why the frustration on social media matters. When women push back against the endless “ladies, do not do this” and “ladies, do not go there”, they are not necessarily rejecting safety. They are asking a more fundamental question:
Why is the freedom of the potential victim being treated as the variable that must change?
Why not the behaviour of the potential perpetrator?
Why must women’s lives contract every time violence expands?
South Africa cannot solve gender-based violence by turning women into prisoners of their own precautions. Women cannot educate every violent man, rehabilitate perpetrators, repair the criminal justice system, redesign unsafe communities, arrest criminals or prosecute offenders.
That work requires families, communities, schools, men, civil society, police, courts and government.
The government has classified gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster, recognising the scale of the crisis. Parliament has subsequently called for a funded, whole-of-government response centred on prevention, stronger law enforcement and justice responses, survivor support and accountability.
That recognition must mean more than another declaration. It must translate into prevention, accountability, effective investigations, functioning justice systems and support for survivors.
The South African government’s own analysis of violence against women recognises that this is a national crisis requiring action beyond isolated responses to individual crimes.
And the South African Police Service crime statistics remind us that violence cannot be understood only through individual incidents. Crime statistics are ultimately about people, families and communities living with the consequences of violence.
Because gender-based violence does not begin with a body being found.
It begins much earlier, in entitlement, control, humiliation, misogyny, coercion and the normalisation of violence.
By the time a woman’s body is found, the final page of a much longer story has already been written.
Our task is to change the story before it reaches that page.
So yes, tell your sister to call when she gets home. Tell your friend to share her location if it makes her feel safer. Walk with someone if you can. Look after one another.
But let us not confuse these acts of care with a solution to violence.
A woman should not have to be exceptionally cautious to deserve an ordinary life.
She does not have to be home by a particular hour to deserve to come home. She does not have to be accompanied to deserve to be safe. She does not have to make every perfect decision to deserve to live.
She simply must be alive.
That should have been enough.
And perhaps that is where our conversation needs to begin: not with another rule for women, but with a refusal to accept a society in which women’s freedom must continually shrink to accommodate violence.
We cannot keep shrinking women’s maps and calling it safety. At some point, we must make the danger smaller instead.
Oratile Mmolatlou is an MA Sociology candidate at the University of Johannesburg and an administrative assistant at the Faculty of Humanities Dean’s Office.