Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo was a 38-year-old runner. On 9 September, she left her Rhodesfield residence for a routine run and did not return. Her body was found days later in Rhodesfield.
There is something painfully ordinary about her last activity. She was running.
Running is associated with physical activity, recreation, mental wellbeing and, for some, precious solitude.
Yet after Tsontso’s death, running clubs reported growing fear, with runners increasingly reluctant to go out alone and moving towards running in groups.
Her death therefore raises a question that extends beyond the crime: What happens to women’s lives when fear changes how they use space?
This is where the conversation about femicide must go beyond men.
Not beyond male accountability. A person who murders a woman is responsible for the violence. But identifying and condemning the perpetrator cannot be where the conversation ends. We should also ask what happens to women who remain alive and must continually negotiate the possibility of violence.
Do not run alone. Do not walk there. Do not go after dark. Share your live location. Change your route. Find someone to accompany you.
These may be rational responses to danger but they have a cost: the geography of women’s lives becomes smaller.
That shrinking geography is about more than movement. It can mean reduced access to exercise, recreation, solitude, social interaction and nature — ordinary activities through which people pursue health and wellbeing.
There is also a less visible cost. Freedom of movement is not only the legal right to enter a street, park or public space. It is also the practical ability to use that space without constantly organising ordinary behaviour around anticipated danger. When a woman must calculate the hour, route, company, visibility and whether somebody knows where she is before going for a run, the activity has acquired a burden that is not captured by asking only whether she is free to go.
The World Health Organisation recognises that social, environmental and economic conditions influence opportunities to be physically active. It identifies fear of violence and crime in outdoor areas as a barrier to physical activity. WHO guidance also recognises that green and blue spaces can support exercise, relaxation, recreation and social interaction.
Access to environments that support health is therefore not a luxury.
Several of the Ekurhuleni cases have brought attention to bodies being found in open or peripheral spaces. The environments are not identical and should not be treated as though they are. But they raise questions about visibility, access and safety in spaces that exist within or alongside urban life.
Recent reporting from affected Ekurhuleni communities has highlighted residents’ concerns about long grass, broken streetlights and limited visible policing.
We should not claim that these environmental conditions caused the killings. They did not pull a trigger, wield a weapon or make the decision to kill.
But their social meaning matters.
Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence asks us to look beyond violence with an identifiable actor towards social structures that create avoidable differences between what people are able to realise and what could otherwise be possible.
The killing is violence. But what happens when fear begins to shrink women’s everyday world? That is where the structural question begins.
Women may possess freedom of movement while experiencing something narrower in practice when they must repeatedly calculate where, when and with whom it is safe to move. The point is not that precaution makes women powerless. Women exercise agency every day in response to risk. The question is why so much additional safety work should be necessary for participation in public life.
Opportunities to enjoy healthy environments are themselves unequal.
Research by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory has documented this spatial inequality. Its research found large quantities and high densities of green carbon across Sandton’s gardens, parks and tree-lined streets, compared with minimal levels in neighbouring Alexandra, where green areas and parks are scarce.
The point is not that Sandton is free from crime or neglect, nor that Alexandra’s environment causes violence. It is to ask why opportunities to access healthy, usable environments remain so unevenly distributed across the same city.
Fear adds another boundary.
People adapt to spaces they perceive as unsafe. Women change routes. Runners form groups. People learn which places and times to avoid.
Fear becomes incorporated into everyday behaviour.
This matters when we think about maintenance too. Cutting grass, repairing lights or cleaning an area may improve its physical condition but physical repair does not necessarily restore people’s trust in a place. A space can be repaired materially while remaining socially marked by fear. Sustained maintenance, visibility and public confidence therefore matter beyond the immediate response that follows tragedy.
We must consider the women who remain alive: the runner who changes her route, the woman who gives up solitude, the woman who no longer walks somewhere alone and the woman whose freedom increasingly depends on calculating risk.
Yes, we must continue asking: Who is killing women?
But this is beyond men.
We must also ask: What kind of society are we building around women while they are alive?
Perhaps a healthy society should not be measured only by whether women survive its public spaces but by whether women are free to live fully within them.
Hlengiwe Nkomonde is a sociology researcher interested in gender, health, environmental inequality and the social conditions shaping everyday life