A Case for Decolonising the Statistics
By Gillian Schutte | The Counterhegemon
Statistical claims, once circulated through institutional reports and media systems, come to organise how a society is seen and understood. South Africa is framed as uniquely dangerous for women, yet it is Black African women who are most vulnerable within conditions that also produce far higher levels of Black African male death and widespread child deprivation. The specifically gendered framing redirects attention away from these conditions, feeds a neoliberal agenda, and holds Black African men within a structure of blame rather than recognising them as a potentially revolutionary class shaped by the same system.
South Africa is not the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman. It is one of the most dangerous places to be Black African, and more dangerous still to be Black, male and under the age of thirty-five, where the highest probability of violent death is concentrated.
Yet this is not how the crisis is narrated. What circulates with consistency is the figure that between 12 and 15 women are murdered each day, amounting to roughly 5,500 women a year, and from this figure an entire story is constructed about the nature of South African society. The number is repeatedly presented as evidence of a uniquely gendered pathology, as though the phenomenon can be explained through gender alone.
The question that is rarely pursued is simple. Who are these women, and under what conditions are they dying?
The figure of 12 to 15 women murdered per day does not describe a generalised risk shared evenly across society. Lethal harm in South Africa is not randomly distributed. It is patterned. It follows the lines of class, space and history. The overwhelming majority of those subjected to violent acts, as well as those who carry them out, are Black Africans living in working-class and impoverished areas shaped by overcrowding, unemployment and limited access to services.
The women who lose their lives each day are overwhelmingly poor and Black, drawn from the same communities that generate the men who die in far greater numbers. White women, who are far less exposed to these conditions, face significantly lower levels of lethal harm.
When this context is removed, the statistic produces a false universality. It suggests that women as a category are under equal threat from men as a category, when both those affected and those enacting these acts are formed within the same environment.
When the full statistical landscape is examined, the scale becomes visible. In a recent three-month reporting period, 5,727 people were killed, of which 4,890 were male and 837 were female. This translates into approximately 63 deaths per day, with around 54 men losing their lives daily compared to roughly 9 women. Across longer timeframes, between 85 and 90 percent of those killed in such incidents are men, overwhelmingly young Black men from working-class communities, many of whom do not reach the age of thirty-five.
They account for the largest share of loss of life in this country.
Sexual violence is equally severe and demands serious engagement. South Africa records over 50,000 reported rapes each year, amounting to roughly 140 to 150 cases per day, with the majority of those affected being Black African women and girls living in conditions of poverty and instability. These violations are not evenly distributed. They are concentrated within the same environments that generate widespread social breakdown.
At the same time, a smaller but significant number of those affected are male, estimated at between 2,500 and 5,000 reported cases annually, a figure widely understood to be underreported. Sexual harm against boys and men, particularly within institutional settings, remains largely obscured within public discourse.
This complicates any attempt to frame the crisis as moving in a single direction.
To describe this as a crisis of gender-based violence without situating it within its material context produces a fundamental misreading. Gender shapes who is involved, yet it does not explain why these patterns are so pervasive. The explanation lies in the conditions under which people are compelled to live.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, with a Gini coefficient above 0.6 and youth unemployment exceeding 60 percent. More than half of all children live in poverty, and approximately one in four children is stunted, their physical and cognitive development permanently shaped by malnutrition. Over 10 million people live below the food poverty line and do not have reliable access to adequate nutrition.
Children grow up within environments marked by hunger, instability and overcrowding, often without consistent access to healthcare, sanitation or educational support. Sanitation is frequently framed as a gendered burden, and in many respects it is, yet it is carried within households and communities where infrastructure has collapsed for everyone, where water systems fail and dignity is compromised across the social body.
Exposure to harm begins early and becomes embedded as part of socialisation. By the time young men enter adulthood, many have already been shaped within conditions in which these patterns are normalised and expected.
This is the terrain that gives rise to both those who endure harm and those who enact it.
Women live within this same terrain and experience harm under distinct and often harsh conditions. At the same time, when female mortality is considered in its entirety, a broader pattern emerges. South Africa records well over 110,000 female deaths each year, of which approximately 5,500 result from homicide. The majority of women die from causes linked to poverty and systemic neglect, including hypertension, stroke, diabetes, HIV and tuberculosis, all of which are closely associated with chronic stress, poor nutrition and limited access to healthcare.
Women are therefore losing their lives through acts of interpersonal harm, but mostly through the slow and cumulative effects of economic exclusion.
This wider reality is rarely foregrounded. Instead, female mortality is implicitly collapsed into male aggression, creating the impression that the primary threat to women’s lives is interpersonal rather than structural. In doing so, the economic system that generates vulnerability across the entire population recedes from view.
Within a critical race framework, this pattern is recognisable. It operates as a racialised trope in which Black male aggression is foregrounded as the defining feature of social disorder, while the conditions that give rise to it are obscured. Black men are cast into a fixed position within discourse, at once hyper-visible as offenders and invisible as those most exposed to harm, a dual construction that sustains their criminalisation and justifies their containment.
The language of gender becomes the organising frame through which the crisis is understood, and this framing performs a clear political function. It allows these patterns to be interpreted as a problem of behaviour rather than as a consequence of political economy. It enables a narrative in which Black men are positioned primarily as offenders, while their own deaths and lived conditions are marginalised.
This reflects the way in which information is selected, strategically arranged and circulated a truth.
Within global discourse, gender has become a central index through which countries of the Global South are evaluated. It provides a language that appears universally acceptable while allowing for continuous judgement and intervention. It sustains an NGO economy that reproduces itself through the management of social crises, often organised around issues that are legible and fundable within international frameworks. The suffering of women becomes the most acceptable site through which funding, programming and institutional legitimacy are secured.
At the same time, Black men remain held within a structure of blame. They are kept within systems of surveillance, discipline and containment, their lives defined through a frame that recognises their capacity for harm while ignoring the conditions that give rise to it.
This is how power stabilises itself.
Historically, young, economically marginalised men have formed the backbone of resistance movements. To represent them primarily through the lens of violence is to displace that political potential and to contain it within a framework of pathology.
Meanwhile, the material conditions remain unchanged.
An economy shaped through neoliberal policy frameworks associated with the IMF and World Bank cannot absorb its population into meaningful work, cannot feed its children and cannot provide stability. It produces surplus populations who exist outside formal economic life, and these patterns follow from this condition.
Women experience this terrain under distinct and often harsh conditions, men lose their lives within it in far greater numbers, and children absorb its realities long before they can comprehend them.
To reduce this reality to a crisis of gender-based violence is to name the symptom while leaving the structure intact.
The cause of what is unfolding in South Africa does not lie in gender.
It lies in the political economy that organises life itself.
Photo by : Gillian Schutte: Marikana 2012