South Africa’s response to gender-based violence and femicide has moved through several distinct stages: public mobilisation and emergency political intervention, the creation of a national strategic framework, legislative reform, institutional restructuring and, more recently, efforts to treat GBV as a broader national disaster-management and governance challenge. The progression matters because each stage attempted to solve a different weakness in the previous response. Yet the expansion of policies and institutions has not automatically translated into an equally effective response on the ground.
The history of the response is therefore not simply a story of government doing more. It is a story of a state gradually building a larger system around a problem that proved difficult to contain through individual laws, police action or awareness campaigns. The important question is how the response evolved, what each stage was intended to achieve, and where implementation continued to fall short.
The response did not begin with the National Strategic Plan
South Africa’s current GBV framework is sometimes discussed as though it began with the National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide in 2020.
It did not.
The state had already developed criminal justice mechanisms, victim-support programmes, awareness campaigns and specialised services before the national strategic framework was introduced.
One important example is the GBV Command Centre, established by the Department of Social Development in 2013 to provide psychosocial support and counselling. Government described the service as a mechanism for assisting survivors across South Africa, including people in remote and underdeveloped areas.
The broader policy environment also included specialised criminal justice mechanisms, including sexual offences courts, Thuthuzela Care Centres and specialised police investigative units.
These initiatives addressed particular parts of the problem.
What was increasingly questioned was whether the individual pieces were functioning as one national system.
That concern became much more prominent after 2018.
2018: The Presidential Summit changes the political response
A major turning point came with the Presidential Summit on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide in November 2018.
The summit brought government and civil society together around the need for a more coordinated national response. The later National Strategic Plan records that the summit resulted in a declaration committing government, business, labour and civil society to collaborate on concrete measures to address GBV and femicide. It also called for a multisectoral structure to coordinate implementation.
The importance of the summit was therefore institutional as well as political.
Instead of treating GBV primarily as a collection of individual crimes, the emerging framework increasingly treated it as a national social problem requiring coordinated intervention.
That distinction would shape the response that followed.
2019: The crisis becomes an emergency response
The following year brought a shift from long-term policy development to urgent intervention.
The government established an Interim Steering Committee on GBVF in 2019 to help develop the longer-term strategic framework while also coordinating an immediate response.
In September 2019, Parliament approved the Emergency Response Action Plan following a special joint sitting.
The plan was deliberately short term.
It was designed to address urgent weaknesses while a more comprehensive national strategy was being developed.
The government’s stated interventions included improving access to justice, changing social norms and behaviour, strengthening institutional architecture and accountability, and creating economic opportunities for women.
Around R1.6 billion was sourced through budget reprioritisation for the emergency programme. Government said the resources supported areas including sexual offences courts, Thuthuzela Care Centres and SAPS Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Investigation Units.
The significance of 2019 was that GBV was no longer being addressed solely through individual programmes.
It was being treated as requiring an emergency, cross-government intervention.
The Emergency Response Action Plan was never intended to be the final answer
The emergency plan was designed to operate for six months.
That limitation was deliberate.
Government recognised that urgent measures could not substitute for a longer-term national framework.
The plan therefore became a bridge between the immediate emergency response and the National Strategic Plan that followed.
By April 2020, government described the Emergency Response Action Plan as having established a delivery mechanism for longer-term interventions.
This distinction remains important when assessing the history of South Africa’s response.
The emergency plan was not intended to solve GBV in six months.
It was intended to strengthen urgent interventions while establishing the foundations for a longer-term system.
2020: The National Strategic Plan creates a longer-term framework
The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide was approved in 2020.
It was intended to provide a coordinated, multisectoral framework covering the government’s response and the role of wider society. The Justice Department describes it as a strategic policy and programming framework developed following the 2018 Presidential Summit.
The plan moved the response beyond emergency measures.
Its six pillars were:
- Accountability, leadership and coordination
- Prevention and restoration of the social fabric
- Protection, safety and justice
- Response, care, support and healing
- Economic empowerment
- Research and information systems
These pillars were significant because they recognised that violence cannot be reduced through criminal justice alone. Prevention, survivor support, economic vulnerability, data and institutional accountability were incorporated into the same national framework.
The strategy also explicitly recognised differences among women and affected groups, including differences associated with age, disability, location, sexual orientation, gender identity and nationality.
2020 also changed the idea of what a GBV response should contain
The National Strategic Plan was broader than a conventional crime policy.
It connected GBV to poverty, unemployment, inequality, social norms and institutional accountability.
That represented an important conceptual shift.
If violence is influenced by social and economic conditions, then policing and prosecution can address only part of the problem.
The strategy consequently included economic empowerment and prevention alongside justice and protection.
This broader approach is also why education and behaviour-change programmes became part of the policy discussion.
But the expansion of the framework created a new challenge.
The more sectors involved, the harder coordination becomes.
The pandemic complicated implementation
The National Strategic Plan was adopted as South Africa entered the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic affected government operations, public gatherings, service delivery and access to institutions.
The government continued its GBV response during the national state of disaster, including through the 16 Days of Activism campaign and the broader 365 Days Campaign.
The pandemic also reinforced the importance of remote support mechanisms.
The Department of Social Development reported increased demand for its GBV Command Centre after March 2020 and expanded its workforce with additional social workers.
This period demonstrated a broader feature of GBV policy.
The effectiveness of the response can be affected by circumstances outside GBV policy itself.
A health emergency, economic shock or institutional disruption can alter access to police, courts, shelters, healthcare and social services.
2020 onward: From emergency response to institutionalisation
Once the National Strategic Plan was established, the central challenge changed.
The question was no longer simply:
What should government do urgently?
It became:
How should government organise itself to implement the strategy over a decade?
Cabinet had already approved the establishment of a National Council on GBVF in March 2020. The Council was intended to mobilise national, provincial and local participation and oversee implementation of the National Strategic Plan. Cabinet also approved an Inter-Ministerial Committee and envisaged the possibility of legislation establishing the institutional arrangement.
This marked the beginning of another stage in the response.
GBV policy was becoming institutionalised.
2022: A second Presidential Summit reviews the response
In 2022, South Africa held a Second Presidential Summit on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide.
The government described the summit as an opportunity to assess progress since the first summit and renew the national commitment.
President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged at the time that violence against women and children continued despite the interventions introduced since 2018. Government cited an increase in reported sexual offences and rape between 2017/18 and 2021/22 as part of the continuing challenge.
The second summit therefore reflected a significant change in the government’s position.
The country was no longer designing its first national response.
It was reviewing an existing one.
That raised a more difficult question: why had substantial policy intervention not yet produced the scale of change that had been expected?
Legislative reform becomes a central part of the response
The period following the first summit also produced important legislative changes.
The government has highlighted amendments to the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Act, the Domestic Violence Act and the Criminal and Related Matters Amendment Act as part of the broader reform programme.
These changes matter because legislation determines aspects of how institutions respond to violence.
But legislation is not self-executing.
A new legal requirement can only affect outcomes if police, prosecutors, courts, social workers and other institutions have the capacity and systems needed to implement it.
This is one of the recurring themes in South Africa’s GBV policy history.
The state has repeatedly moved from identifying a weakness to creating a formal mechanism to address it.
The harder stage has often been implementation.
2024: The National Council gains a statutory foundation
A further institutional milestone came with the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Act.
The legislation provided a statutory basis for the National Council rather than leaving national coordination dependent primarily on administrative arrangements.
That matters because institutional permanence can make coordination more stable across changes in government structures.
But legislation also raises expectations.
Once a statutory institution exists, questions about its budget, staffing, authority, performance and accountability become more concrete.
The challenge therefore moves from creating the institution to making the institution effective.
2025: The government begins reviewing the first five years
By 2025, the response had reached another stage.
Government began presenting the National Strategic Plan’s five-year review as an opportunity to assess progress rather than simply announce new commitments.
At the 2025 launch of the 16 Days campaign, government reported gains including multisectoral accountability structures, reporting by more than 30 national departments and stronger partnerships between government, civil society, business and development partners. It also highlighted legislative reforms, specialised GBV services and progress in clearing the DNA backlog in GBV cases.
Those are implementation indicators.
But they should not be confused with proof that GBV itself has been eliminated or reduced to the desired level.
The distinction between institutional progress and social outcomes is crucial.
A government can establish more services without eliminating the underlying violence.
The response has expanded from policing to prevention
The chronological evolution shows a widening definition of the problem.
Earlier interventions naturally focused heavily on criminal justice and victim support.
The later framework added prevention, economic empowerment, social norms, research and information systems.
That expansion reflects an increasingly broad understanding of why violence persists.
The government has described prevention as including interventions aimed at changing negative social norms and behaviour, while the National Strategic Plan treats prevention and restoration of the social fabric as one of its six pillars.
This is important because prevention is harder to demonstrate than enforcement.
A court case can be counted.
An arrest can be counted.
A protection order can be counted.
Changing behaviour across an entire population is much more difficult to measure.
The response has also become more data-dependent
Research and information systems became a formal pillar of the National Strategic Plan.
That reflects a basic problem.
A government cannot effectively target prevention or services if it does not know where violence occurs, which groups are most affected, how cases move through the system and where institutional failures occur.
Data also makes it possible to distinguish between different forms of violence.
Femicide, intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, domestic violence and other forms of GBV overlap but are not identical problems.
Treating all of them as one statistic can obscure important differences in risk and intervention.
The distinction between femicide and the broader category of GBV is therefore essential to interpreting the evolution of government policy.
From emergency to disaster: a change in scale
Calling GBV a national emergency emphasised urgency.
Treating the issue as a national disaster introduces a somewhat different institutional logic.
An emergency demands rapid action.
A disaster framework asks how institutions coordinate across a complex, persistent crisis, how resources are mobilised and how government systems respond over time.
This shift is important because GBV is not a single event with a clear end point.
It is a persistent social problem that interacts with crime, inequality, health, housing, employment, education, policing and justice.
That means the response increasingly resembles a whole-of-government system rather than a single campaign.
The response can be understood as five overlapping phases
| Period | Main policy development | Primary purpose | Remaining challenge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before 2018 | Existing laws, specialised services and support mechanisms | Respond to individual forms of violence | Fragmentation and limited coordination |
| 2018-2019 | Presidential Summit and Interim Steering Committee | Establish a coordinated national response | Turning political commitments into rapid implementation |
| 2019-2020 | Emergency Response Action Plan | Address urgent weaknesses and mobilise resources | Moving from short-term emergency action to sustained programmes |
| 2020-2024 | National Strategic Plan and institutional reforms | Build a comprehensive, multisectoral system | Coordinating departments and implementing the plan consistently |
| 2024 onward | National Council legislation, implementation review and expanded oversight | Institutionalise accountability and evaluate progress | Demonstrating measurable outcomes rather than activity alone |
The phases overlap rather than replacing one another completely.
Existing services continued after new strategies were introduced, while emergency mechanisms became part of the longer-term response.
What changed, and what did not?
The institutional response has clearly become more extensive.
South Africa moved from a collection of programmes toward a formal national framework.
It established an emergency response plan.
It developed a ten-year strategy.
It created multisectoral coordination mechanisms.
It amended legislation.
It established a statutory National Council.
It expanded the emphasis on prevention, data and economic empowerment.
It also developed more specialised services and continued investing in criminal justice responses.
But the persistence of GBV demonstrates that institutional expansion is not equivalent to resolution.
That distinction is critical.
The history is therefore not one of simply moving from failure to success.
It is a history of successive attempts to address weaknesses that became apparent as the response developed.
The problem of implementation became more visible
As the policy framework expanded, so did the number of institutions responsible for delivering it.
Police, prosecutors, courts, health services, social development structures, municipalities, provincial authorities, schools, civil-society organisations and national departments all have roles.
This creates a paradox.
A more comprehensive response can also become a more complicated response.
If responsibilities are unclear, institutions can work in parallel rather than together.
If funding is fragmented, programmes may not operate consistently.
If data systems are disconnected, government may struggle to determine whether interventions are working.
If local structures are weak, national policy may have limited practical effect.
This is why implementation has become one of the defining questions in the second phase of South Africa’s GBV policy history.
Why the evolution matters for femicide
Femicide presents the most severe endpoint of violence against women.
That makes it tempting to judge the entire GBV response by homicide figures alone.
But the policy evolution suggests a more complicated chain.
Prevention aims to reduce exposure to violence.
Early intervention aims to identify risk.
Protection mechanisms aim to reduce immediate danger.
Police and prosecutors investigate reported crimes.
Courts determine criminal responsibility.
Shelters and social services provide alternatives to dangerous environments.
Economic interventions can address forms of dependence and vulnerability.
Research and data systems are intended to identify patterns and weaknesses.
Each part operates at a different point in the chain.
A national reduction in femicide would therefore depend on multiple parts of the system functioning together rather than on one policy instrument.
The question of what measurable success would actually look like is examined in .
Individual cases remain part of the larger policy story
National policy can sometimes appear abstract until it is examined through individual cases.
The death of Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, for example, illustrates how an individual killing can become part of wider public discussion about women’s safety, investigation and accountability.
Similarly, questions surrounding killings in Ekurhuleni demonstrate why individual investigations can raise broader questions about police information, investigative links and institutional response.
These cases should not be treated as representative of every incident of GBV.
Their importance lies in showing how the national system is experienced through individual cases.
The response is now judged against a higher standard
The first major stage of South Africa’s modern GBV response was about recognition.
The country increasingly recognised GBV and femicide as a national crisis requiring political attention.
The second stage was emergency intervention.
Government attempted to mobilise resources quickly and strengthen existing services.
The third stage was institutionalisation.
The National Strategic Plan created a longer-term framework and new structures were developed to coordinate it.
The fourth stage is implementation and accountability.
This is arguably the most difficult stage because it requires evidence that institutions actually perform better and that survivors experience meaningful improvements.
The government’s own five-year review has highlighted both progress and the continuing need for faster, deeper and more coordinated action.
That is a significant change in the nature of the policy debate.
The question is no longer simply whether South Africa recognises the problem.
It is whether the increasingly elaborate response is producing the outcomes it was designed to achieve.
The next phase is about proving that the system works
South Africa’s GBV response has evolved from individual programmes to emergency action, from emergency action to a national strategic framework, and from that framework toward permanent institutional structures.
Each stage added something.
The 2018 summit created political momentum.
The 2019 Emergency Response Action Plan introduced urgent, targeted intervention.
The 2020 National Strategic Plan established a broader ten-year framework.
Subsequent legislation sought to institutionalise coordination.
The five-year review has shifted attention toward assessing what has actually been implemented.
The remaining challenge is therefore not simply to produce another declaration of urgency.
It is to determine whether the system can reliably turn policy into prevention, protection, investigation, support and accountability.
That requires transparent evidence about what is working, where services remain inaccessible, which interventions produce measurable changes and where institutions continue to fail. The evolution from national crisis to a broader national disaster response will ultimately matter only if the expansion of the state response produces a corresponding improvement in the safety, protection and justice experienced by women and other people affected by gender-based violence.