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A Province on High Alert
Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi announced on Thursday that the province has identified ten police stations recording alarming rates of rape cases, ring-fencing them for targeted additional resources as part of a sweeping response to the gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) crisis gripping South Africa’s most populous province — with Ivory Park topping that deeply troubling list. The intervention, framed as a direct answer to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national directives on GBVF and violent crime, signals that Gauteng’s leadership is under mounting pressure to translate political will into concrete action on the ground.
The ten stations identified — Ivory Park, Roodepoort, Alexandra, Mamelodi East, Diepsloot, Kagiso, Atteridgeville, Rietgat, Meadowlands and Thembisa — will receive focused support spanning policing capacity, victim empowerment programmes, docket management and a range of related services designed to close the systemic gaps that have long allowed gender-based violence to fester in communities across the province. These are not peripheral, obscure localities; they are the heartbeat of Gauteng’s working-class and township communities, places where millions of young South Africans live, study and try to build futures.
Lesufi delivered the announcement at a high-level media briefing alongside Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, Deputy Minister of Police Polly Boshielo and provincial police commissioner Lieutenant-General Tommy Mthombeni, underscoring the multi-departmental weight behind the initiative. “We are of the view that if we can’t put additional resources in terms of policing, victim empowerment and all related issues that we have raised here, including dockets, in these 10 police stations, we have failed the call the president has given us,” Lesufi said, in remarks that carried both urgency and a rare admission of institutional accountability.
The Crisis That Forced the Government’s Hand
The announcement comes in the wake of a period of acute public horror after the bodies of eleven women were discovered in and around Kempton Park in Ekurhuleni, with a twelfth woman found dead in Soweto shortly thereafter — a sequence of events that ignited outrage across the country and forced the national government to respond at the highest level. President Ramaphosa’s subsequent national address on GBVF, in which he instructed state institutions to implement urgent measures, set the political clock ticking for provinces like Gauteng to demonstrate that their responses would be substantive rather than symbolic. The briefing by Lesufi and his colleagues represents the province’s first major public accounting of how it intends to meet that mandate.
To coordinate the response with the breadth it demands, Gauteng has convened all eleven of its municipalities, nine of its ten provincial departments and representatives from the national government into a unified structure. A newly established intergovernmental committee on GBVF will meet on a weekly basis to track the implementation of measures arising from Ramaphosa’s directives, creating a layer of ongoing accountability that, if genuinely enforced, could mark a departure from the ad hoc crisis management that has historically characterised government responses to gender-based violence in South Africa.
Beyond Policing: A Systemic Rethink
Lesufi was explicit that the government’s response would not be confined to policing alone, acknowledging that the roots of GBVF run far deeper than any single institution can address. The province is currently examining the 3,462 interim and final protection orders before courts across its five regions, scrutinising whether those orders — meant to shield vulnerable women and children from their abusers — are actually being enforced on the ground, a question whose answer, in many cases, is already known to be deeply inadequate. This audit of protection orders, issued through Gauteng’s 43 magistrates’ courts, reflects a growing recognition that legal instruments without enforcement are little more than paper promises.
On the support infrastructure side, seven Thuthuzela Care Centres are being strengthened, and seven sexual offences courts will receive dedicated support, while the province works toward establishing 144 victim-friendly rooms at courts across the region. Support brigades will also be deployed to assist victims during court appearances in cases where families cannot be traced or are otherwise unavailable — a measure that directly addresses one of the most isolating and re-traumatising aspects of the justice process for survivors. Meanwhile, Gauteng is directly funding 115 non-profit organisations operating in the GBVF sector, with additional budget adjustments under consideration for NGOs requiring further support.
Municipalities across the province have been given a seven-day deadline to audit safety risks in their areas, including broken streetlights, overgrown public spaces and unsafe facilities — the kind of environmental factors that, while unglamorous, have a well-documented relationship with the incidence of gender-based violence in urban settings. Simultaneously, a comprehensive audit of police stations themselves is underway, covering docket management, protection order processing, physical infrastructure and victim-support services, with Lesufi stating clearly that the province intends to determine whether full services are genuinely available to citizens who need them most. The stakes, for the young women living in these communities, could not be higher.
