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South Africa’s public debate about lethal violence gives considerable attention to the murder of women. The country’s crime statistics demand that the much larger number of men being killed receives comparable scrutiny.

Femicide is generally understood as the killing of a woman because of her sex. In South Africa, however, the term is often used more loosely to describe virtually every murder of a woman. The looser definition allows every female murder victim to be presented as evidence that women are uniquely endangered in South Africa. Read enough mainstream coverage and one might conclude that a woman is more likely than a man to be murdered in this country.

The opposite is true.

The Common Sense examined South African Police Service data recording the sex of murder victims between 2013 and 2023.

In 2023, South Africa recorded 27 621 murders. Men made up the vast majority of victims at approximately 82% (roughly 22 600 victims), while women accounted for around 14% (roughly 3 800 victims), with children making up the remainder. This distribution reflects a decade-long trend, during which men and women consistently represented an average of 82% and 14% of murder victims, respectively. The graph below illustrates these findings.

Because women outnumber men in South Africa, The Common Sense calculated the murder rate separately by sex. In 2023, approximately 100.6 men were murdered per 100 000 men, compared to a rate of roughly 15.8 per 100 000 for women. Over the course of the decade, a South African man was, on average, 6.6 times more likely to be murdered than a woman. The chart below illustrates these comparative trends.

The figures above establish that men face a much greater risk of being murdered in South Africa. The female murder rate nevertheless remains exceptionally high, averaging approximately 13 deaths per 100 000 women over the period examined. The global female homicide rate is approximately 2.2 per 100 000 of the female population. This means women in South Africa are murdered at roughly six times the rate of their global counterparts.

The aim of the analysis was to understand why the murder rate for women in South Africa is so high, but the examination of the research left fundamental questions about the causes of the murder of women unanswered.

The volume of published material on the murder of women in South Africa, often loosely termed femicide, creates the impression that the causes have been thoroughly investigated and the answers are available. Yet The Common Sense repeatedly encountered heavily ideological explanations that moved too quickly from describing the killings to invoking patriarchy, misogyny, male dominance, apartheid, colonialism, or sweeping claims about the attitudes of men. Too often, the confidence with which these explanations were presented exceeded the strength of the evidence offered to support them.

Beyond the figures presented here, The Common Sense could establish little with confidence about what motivates this violence. That became the most important finding of the exercise. If basic questions about why these murders happen remain unanswered, how can the government determine which measures are most likely to prevent them?