Gender-based violence is not simply an accumulation of individual crimes; it is a manifestation of structural inequality woven into the fabric of society. It is a social justice crisis that has metastasised into every corner of our lives, physical and digital. If GBV is fundamentally a question of structural inequality, then our philanthropic response must be equally structural.
On 21 November 2025, thousands of women dressed in black lay on the ground across South Africa for 15 minutes. One minute for every woman murdered each day in this country. The silence was deafening. The Women for Change movement had seized the global spotlight on the eve of the G20 Summit, forcing world leaders gathering in Johannesburg to confront an uncomfortable truth: you cannot speak about economic growth while women's bodies remain the battlefield beneath it.
This was not merely a protest. It was a national reckoning with a crisis that President Cyril Ramaphosa would finally declare a national disaster - a recognition that came not from political will alone, but from the weight of more than one million signatures and the bodies of 15 women lost every single day.
The question we must now ask is not whether GBV constitutes an emergency, but whether we possess the collective courage to address it as the structural injustice it truly represents.
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The anatomy of structural violence
The statistics paint a picture of a society at war with half its population.
More than one in three South African women - nearly 36% - have experienced physical or sexual...
