When the hashtags fade, the fear doesn't - IOL

Dr Maryam C Adewunmi, Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg.

Women's Month has come and gone. Issues about women dominated the national discourse: marches, speeches, hashtags, and radio and TV talk shows focused on women's emancipation and gender-based violence (GBV). No sooner had August ended than the conversation quietened.

We appear to be waiting for another calendar cycle to rekindle the topic — the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children from November 25 to December 10.

News broke of a possible serial killer in Kempton Park — jolting the nation. The conversation points to a perennial problem: South Africa remains among the most dangerous places for women.

Women's personal safety habits are not adequate to fully protect themselves. There is a problem when focus on the safety of women and children is dictated by a cyclical calendar of campaigns.

This attention is often fleeting, activated by specific dates rather than a constant commitment. When the microphones are silenced, panels conclude, and hashtags fade, silence envelops the discourse. The real work begins, challenging us to confront realities that persist beyond public engagement.

For countless women in South Africa, daily routine unfolds in a familiar, unsettling manner: a hand reaches for a mobile phone muted in anticipation of threats, while keys are gripped tightly. Each step is accompanied by a rehearsed mental map of the journey home. Which route is safer? Should I wait for someone to walk me to the car? Should I share my location? These questions are not the language of freedom. They are the language of fear — a daily mantra for survival.

Seventy years ago, Black women confronted a state determined to control their mobility through apartheid pass laws. Today, the passbook is gone, yet whether a woman can move through society freely and safely remains relevant. Apartheid's pass laws and contemporary gender-based violence are not the same thing. One was an explicit instrument of state power; the other takes the form of threats, coercion, stalking, intimate-partner violence, assault, and murder.

The point is not equivalence. The point is power. Who gets to determine where a woman can go? Who makes her feel that certain streets, places, times, or relationships are too dangerous to enter? Who decides the conditions under which she can exercise a freedom that is supposed to belong to her as a human being and as a citizen? These questions cannot be confined to Women's Month.

Referral is not the same as justice, and successful prosecution makes accountability real. Investigation and prosecution contribute to accountability, but justice depends on what happens after a woman reports violence.

Effective investigations, competent prosecution, and appropriate consequences for perpetrators are part of deterrence. A hashtag cannot deter a man who calculates that he is unlikely to be caught, charged, or convicted. A functioning justice system can.

Behind figures are women and girls whose lives have been disrupted by violence, intimidation, fear, and death. Violence is frequently underreported. Some women never reach a police station, never make a report, and never become part of a statistic.

In an intimate relationship, control takes many forms before physical violence becomes visible: isolation, restrictions on work, monitoring phones, demands for location updates, financial dependence, threats and humiliation. By the time violence becomes visible, a woman may have spent months or years adjusting her movements to someone else's dictates.

Treating women's safety as primarily a woman's responsibility is a matter of grave concern. Do not walk there or travel alone. Do not come home late. Do not leave him or make him angry. Share your location. Some of these measures may save a woman's life.

Something is fundamentally wrong when society becomes better at teaching women how to anticipate violence than it is at preventing violence. Why must a woman calculate the risk attached to exercising ordinary freedom? Why should going to work, attending a social gathering, travelling home, leaving an abusive relationship or walking through a public space require a personal safety strategy? We have replaced the bureaucratic checkpoint with an internalised one. The state no longer needs to stamp restrictions on a document if fear has taught a woman to regulate her movement.

Asserting that women are constitutionally equal is insufficient. Freedom is experienced in whether a woman can walk home without fear, leave a relationship without fearing retaliation, travel without checking who is behind her, or occupy public space without calculating whether she will make it home safely.

Race, class, geography and economic power shape vulnerability differently. However, fear transcends these distinctions. The responsibility cannot rest with individual women.

Families, communities, schools, institutions, the state and men must acknowledge their share of responsibility. Men must engage in the solution to challenge behaviours and cultures that normalise control, humiliation and violence. Institutions must stop treating women's safety as something women must individually manage. Safe public transport, responsive policing, accessible support services, effective investigations and consequences for perpetrators are conditions of freedom.

If we commemorate women's struggles in one month and allow the conversation to quieten, we risk turning a continuing struggle into a calendar event. Commemoration has value, but memory without accountability becomes ceremony without transformation.

Women who challenged apartheid did not march so that future generations could exchange one form of restriction for another, or remain socially conditioned to fear where they go, when they leave, and whether they will return safely.

In a few months, the country will enter the 16 Days of Activism period. We will hear statistics, promises, and calls for action. But before then, and after it ends, women still have to live. That is the uncomfortable space we rarely discuss: the ordinary days between campaigns — when there is no microphone, television panel, or hashtag.

Just a woman deciding whether she feels safe enough to walk through a street, leave a relationship, take a taxi, return home after dark, or live without constantly being on guard. This is the conversation we should be having now, before the next round of speeches begins. Not simply: how do women protect themselves?

But why do women continue to need so much protection in the first place? The test of freedom is not simply whether the law permits a woman to go somewhere. The test is whether she can go there without fear. August is over. The conversation must continue.