In a society as unequal and diverse as SA is, there are few things people from across different social and economic strata agree on. Concerns about crime and safety is fast becoming the main issue that South Africans feel adversely affected by, whether they are in the leafy suburbs of a big city or the dusty streets of a village. We are unsafe.
Statistics SA earlier this year released a Governance, Public Safety and Justice report revealing that only 40% of South Africans feel safe walking in their own neighbourhood at night. In the place that people call home, among a community of people they know and live with, most South Africans still feel at risk.
High rates of gender-based violence, particularly by intimate partners, means that women especially cannot even feel safe in their homes. Over 85% of both men and women reported that they think an intimate partner is most likely to commit an act of gender-based violence, followed by the belief that perpetrators are close relatives and friends. We have created a society where our most personal relations and familiar spaces have become people and places that make us feel under threat rather than safe.
Last week, the nation was once again rocked by the news that a women was brutally murdered while simply going about her day shopping. Twenty-eight-year-old Hillary Gardee, daughter of prominent EFF former leader Godrich Gardee, was tragically abducted and killed while doing a grocery run with her daughter. It is believed that the store she went to was not unfamiliar to her. The people there knew her, and she was easily recognisable to them.
One can only imagine that Hilllary felt a sense of safety going to a familiar place with her young child, only to be met with the worst sort of violence. Many people hearing about her death made comparisons with the feelings they felt in 2019 when Uyinene Mrwetyana, another young women, was raped and killed at a post office. The thought that a trip to a shop or a post office can be deadly rightfully should give us pause as a country. We must ask what kind of society we have created that makes it impossible to feel safe doing the simplest things.
Crime is often a personal experience. In SA, instances of very personal crimes like robbery and murder are some of the highest in the world. However, we have reached a tipping point. Crime is not simply a personal issue. Being the victim or even a perpetrator of a violent crime is not simply about individuals. Crime is not only a private trouble, but also a public issue. Crime has become a normalised part of our society. We have come to accept it as part of the narrative about what it means to live in SA.
We report crime less frequently to the police. With no hope that the police and the government will effectively intervene, we have created and began selling personal solutions to keep ourselves as safe as possible. South Africans feel like when it comes to being safe, we are on our own. While that may feel like an undeniable truth, it is also true that we are together in this state of fear.
As a nation and a state we are co-creating a society that fosters, commits and has become resigned to violence. Among many other stressors like rising unemployment, a high cost of living, and a lack of basic services, people simply cannot put their heads down on their pillows at night feeling safe. That is something we do and should all care about.
The feminists of the 1960s were right. The personal is political. What we experience as deeply personal issues are connected to bigger questions about the kind of society we live in and the extent to which we as individuals and collectives are empowered or constrained when living our daily lives is not simply about our personal efforts. Safety is a political issue.
When so many South Africans feel unsafe, we cannot continue to think of the perpetrators of violence as deviant individuals separate from us. We need to ask how and why our society produces more and more people who feel comfortable violating others.
We cannot keep raising our walls and arming ourselves trying to find private solutions. There is a need for collective solutions based on collective action that does not make feeling safe a private activity but ensures that safety is a public good that we all deserve.
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