Stop teaching women how not to be murdered and focus on the men killing them

How much more careful must we become? How many more routes must we abandon, streets avoid and public spaces surrender before we admit that the problem is not that women are insufficiently cautious?

Cassandra Gudlhuza is the author of Unfathered: Surviving Paternal Brutality to a Life Reclaimed and Unshamed, a memoir about paternal abuse, family silence and gender-based violence in South Africa. She is a former journalist and columnist, and currently serves as a communications executive and founder of Black Circle Communications. She writes on gender, power and silence.

Five women, two months, all found half-naked, bruised and discarded near the R21 in Kempton Park as though they were something that needed to be disposed of. The latest confirmed: Elizabeth Moselakgomo (38) who left her home for an afternoon run on 9 September and did not come back. Her family spent days hoping. They got a body too battered to be immediately identified. And the official public communication – the thing the South African Police Service chose to say out loud to the nation – was a warning directed at women to exercise extreme caution, to take extra precautions, particularly those who exercise outdoors.

Elizabeth Moselakgomo went for a run. That is all she did. Something millions of South African women calculate carefully before attempting. We map routes. We share our locations. We carry our keys between our fingers. We make the quiet, exhausting calculations that have become second nature to women simply trying to move through the world. When she went missing, most of us knew. Not because we had access to the investigation. But because we have all, over years of living in this country, become deeply and grimly accustomed to how this goes. We knew because we know men. We know what men in South Africa do. We know how these stories end. The missing woman near the area where bodies were being found was never going to be a story about someone who simply got lost. We knew she would not come home. We just had to wait for the confirmation. And the response is to tell the next woman to be more careful.

I want to name the absurdity of this directly. When people commit fraud, we do not warn banks to hide their money better. When people drink and drive, we do not warn pedestrians to stay off the roads. But when men murder women; when they hunt them, overpower them, bruise them, strip them and leave them in open veld near a highway, it is women who are warned. It is suggested, with all the sincerity of people who believe they are helping, that the solution to being hunted is to make yourself a smaller target.

This is not a safety strategy. It is an admission, dressed up as concern, that we have decided men’s behaviour is the fixed variable in this equation, and women’s freedom is the one that must be adjusted.

In a chapter of my memoir, Unfathered, I write that “the problem is men”. And I mean that with the full weight of the evidence. Not just the men who kill. But the men who know things and say nothing. The men who see things and look away.