Behind SA’s missing women is a hunt for much larger answers

How many women go missing in SA in any given month, and how many of those cases are still open? It is a question without a clear answer.

While official figures remain out of reach, non-profit organisations that search for missing people say the true scale of the problem is visible long before a case reaches an official docket.

The Pink Ladies, a group dedicated to finding missing people and reuniting them with their families, recorded 33 missing persons cases in August. In the same month, 35 missing people were found, a number that includes cases from earlier months. Three missing people were confirmed dead.

Between September 1 and 8, the organisation logged a further 12 missing persons cases, with nine found and none reported dead. The figure excludes assault, abuse and trafficking-related cases, and other reports the organisation assists with.

Jacqui Thomas, director and co-founder of The Pink Ladies, said too many of these cases passed without notice. She listed a string of challenges that made searching for missing people harder than it should be:

• a lack of education and information in communities;
• poorly trained SAPS members; and
• a shortage of social services on the ground.

She was also blunt about what she called corruption at the highest levels, and government’s failure to deal with it properly.

Funding is another sticking point. As an NGO, NPO and public-benefit organisation, The Pink Ladies relies on donations to keep operating.

Thomas said overseas investors often hold a “tainted and biased view” of South African NGOs, and many investors were reluctant to get involved because of corruption and allegations of incompetence, a reputation, she suggests, that unfairly follows organisations doing the actual work of finding people.

Lisa Vetten, a gender specialist on violence against women, said the fear now gripping Gauteng needed to be understood against the longer trend.

Citing data comparing 1999 with 2020/21, she said the overall rate of women murdered in SA nearly halved over that period, from 24.2 per 100,000 women to 10.6 per 100,000. Despite that decline, she said, SA’s femicide rate was still about five times the global average.

Vetten said femicide needed to be split into two categories: women killed by intimate partners, and women killed by non-intimate partners, including family members, friends or strangers.

Research shows a shift over the past two decades.

In 1999, women were slightly more likely to be killed by someone other than a partner at a rate of 11.4 per 100,000, against 9.5 per 100,000 for intimate partner killings. By 2020/21, that had reversed: intimate partner femicide stood at 5.5 per 100,000, while non-intimate partner femicide had fallen to 4.1 per 100,000.

Police have not confirmed that a serial killer is behind the recent killings in Gauteng, though they continue to link the cases.

Vetten said if that is what this turned out to be, it explained why the fear felt so different. “If this is a serial killer, this is unusual. It’s rare,” she said.

“That’s part of the reason why it is so frightening – because it doesn’t happen often. All of our usual strategies for keeping safe, our understanding of why things happen, get completely blown apart. We don’t know what to do. We feel helpless. We feel nobody can help us.”

Vetten said cases like this called for a different kind of response to the ones usually rolled out for gender-based violence.

“A person who behaves like this is not going to be amenable to conversations, dialogues, prayer groups. The president saying ‘this is wrong, men must stop’, putting billboards on the side of the highway is not enough,” she said.

“This is on the extreme end point of violence against women, and so it needs very different and more intensive interventions than we have usually seen.”

Vetten said there could not be a single strategy for tackling femicide.

“The strategies you use to try to reduce men who kill their wives or their female partners are not the same as the strategies you use for men who rape and murder. They are different,” she said.

Under the SAPS’s own directives, there is no official waiting period before police must open a missing person’s report. Officers must accept a report immediately at any police station and complete an SAPS 55(A) form authorising the distribution of the missing person’s photograph and details to help find them.

Parliament’s portfolio committee on police has previously described refusals to open such cases, or insistence on a 24-hour delay, as a dereliction of duty.

If you are struggling to get a missing person’s case opened, you can escalate the matter directly to the SAPS Bureau for Missing Persons on 021 918 3512, 3449 or 3452, or email missing@@saps.gov.za

TimesLIVE