Ian Cameron, chair of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police, writes an open letter to President Ramaphosa on gender-based violence. He argues that declaring GBV a national disaster in November 2025 changed little in practice, with no extraordinary powers and no clear shift in budgets or capacity. Citing 6,596 rapes reported in three months, understaffed FCS units and billions spent on VIP protection, Cameron calls for that spending to be reviewed and redirected. He also urges government to measure the full journey from report to conviction, so failures in the system can be identified and addressed.
By Ian Cameron*
Mr President,
South Africa recorded 6,596 reported rapes in three months in the latest quarterly crime statistics. That is about 72 a day, three every hour, one every 20 minutes.
And those are only the rapes reported to police.
I want to start there because we have become dangerously comfortable with enormous numbers. We hear 6,596 and the next day another figure arrives. It becomes a graph, a quarterly release, another statistic in a briefing.
For me, it is harder to see these numbers clinically because I have worked directly with some of the families behind this violence.
I remember four-year-old Mia Botha in Paarl. I sat with her family. I attended her funeral.
I remember Bokgabo Poo. Four years old. Abducted while playing. Her little body was mutilated and parts of her remains were found in different places. I worked with her family while they tried to comprehend something no parent should ever have to comprehend.
I remember Nadia Lotz, a 32-year-old mother of three. She was stabbed repeatedly and her throat was cut. I worked with her family too.
And I remember Siphokazi Booi.
I knew her family. I sat through the court process with them.
Siphokazi was 27 years old. Her body was dismembered and her remains were found burning inside a wheelie bin near the railway line in Mbekweni.
Mr President, stop there for a moment.
Not “GBV”. Not another statistic. Not a ribbon, a campaign or a speech.
A 27-year-old woman. Dismembered. Her remains burning in a municipal bin.
Have you ever really forced yourself to think about what a scene like that means? What burning human remains smell like? What the police officers recovering those remains had to see? What her family has to live with for the rest of their lives?
I have.
That is why I struggle with government’s language around gender-based violence when the words are not followed by measurable change.
In November 2025, gender-based violence and femicide was classified as a national disaster. It sounded appropriately serious.
But it was not a declaration of a national state of disaster. It created no extraordinary emergency powers. Government chose to manage the problem largely through existing legislation, structures and contingency arrangements.
So what changed?
That is not a rhetorical question.
If something is a national disaster, its urgency should be visible in budgets, people, vehicles, forensic capacity, prosecutors and outcomes.
SAPS says it has 176 specialised Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences units serving 1,173 police stations.
These are the people investigating rape, child sexual abuse and some of the ugliest crimes imaginable.
I have met good FCS detectives. I have also seen what we expect them to do with too few resources, too few vehicles and overwhelming caseloads.
Commitment is not a substitute for capacity.
At the same time, SAPS spends billions on Protection and Security Services, including VIP protection.
I am not suggesting that the President, Deputy President or anyone facing a genuine threat should suddenly be left without protection. That would be irresponsible.
I am asking something different.
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Have you personally asked whether every rand spent protecting politicians and dignitaries is more important than another FCS detective, another vehicle, better digital case management, faster forensic evidence or another properly investigated rape docket?
Why not review the VIP protection budget strictly against actual threat and risk, and redirect what can responsibly be saved directly into FCS, forensics and frontline investigative capability?
That would make the words “national disaster” mean something.
We also need to be more honest about conviction statistics.
A high conviction rate among cases that actually reach a verdict does not mean most rape victims see justice.
Before the verdict comes the woman who never reports. The suspect who is never identified. The badly investigated docket. The forensic delay. The case that is never enrolled. The victim who eventually gives up.
South African research has repeatedly warned that sexual violence is substantially under-reported.
That is why the 6,596 reported rapes should frighten us even more. They are not the full picture.
And policing alone will never solve this.
The South African Medical Research Council found that around 60% of the women murdered in its 2020/21 national femicide study were killed by an intimate partner.
Think about what that means.
For many women, the danger is not a stranger in a dark street.
It is someone she knows. Someone she trusted. Someone she loved, lived with, had children with or was trying to leave.
That demands uncomfortable questions about us as men.
The HSRC’s national study on gender-based violence found that 22.5% of men who were or had been in intimate relationships agreed that a woman cannot refuse sex with her husband.
That is not a policing problem.
That is a problem with what some men believe.
We need to talk about what boys see growing up, what fathers teach sons, how men speak about women when women are not in the room, and what behaviour our friends tolerate.
We also need to talk about absent fathers without turning it into a simplistic explanation for violence. Children raised by single mothers are not destined to become violent. But men cannot abandon responsibility for raising children and then expect mothers, schools, social workers and eventually the criminal justice system to carry the entire burden.
If we want boys to grow into men who understand responsibility, restraint, respect and healthy relationships, men cannot outsource that job.
There are also men who have suddenly found their voices because violence against women is dominating the news.
Good. We need them.
But we should be honest too. Some of the loudest voices today said bugger-all when abuse was happening quietly behind closed doors, when a friend controlled or humiliated his partner, when a woman was dismissed as difficult for reporting abuse, or when violence against women was treated as a joke.
Their voices are welcome now.
But outrage after another woman is murdered cannot be the beginning and end of men’s contribution.
The same applies to politics.
The discovery of women’s bodies in Ekurhuleni deserves every available investigative resource. If evidence ultimately establishes a common offender or offenders, let that evidence lead us there.
But political parties turning dead women into campaign material helps nobody. Neither does blaming committed detectives every time another body is discovered.
I have met too many good police officers to pretend the problem is simply that nobody cares.
Many of them care deeply.
But good people cannot compensate indefinitely for a weak and fragmented system.
Mr President, South Africa does not need another strategy simply because another crisis has made headlines.
We already have strategies.
We have the National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. We have the Integrated Crime and Violence Prevention Strategy. SAPS has its own action plan.
The real question is what happens when an actual woman walks into an actual police station and asks for help.
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Is there a detective?
Is there a vehicle?
Is the docket handled properly?
Is the risk of further violence recognised?
Does the investigating officer work with the prosecutor early enough?
Is the full risk placed before the court when bail is considered?
Does forensic evidence arrive in time to help the investigation?
That is where a national strategy either becomes real or falls apart.
I want government to start measuring the entire chain.
For every 100 sexual offences reported, how many suspects are identified? How many are arrested? How many cases are enrolled? How many reach trial? How many end in conviction?
Show us where victims fall out of the system.
And if the same point of failure keeps destroying cases year after year, hold somebody accountable.
Do not publish only the final statistic in the chain and expect South Africans to conclude that the entire system is working.
I have sat with families after the politicians, cameras and journalists have gone home.
I have seen a mother trying to work out how she is supposed to get up the next morning without her child.
I have watched families begin organising their lives around court dates.
They do not need someone in Pretoria to explain to them that gender-based violence is a national disaster.
They know.
The question is whether the state knows it when budgets are drafted, posts are filled, vehicles are allocated, dockets are managed and senior managers are evaluated.
Mr President, put the money behind the words.
Properly capacitate FCS.
Give detectives the vehicles, technology and forensic support they need.
Use prosecution-guided investigations in serious gender-based violence cases.
Measure the full journey from report to conviction.
Review protection expenditure and redirect money where it can responsibly protect more people.
And when the same systemic failure continues year after year, let there be consequences.
A national disaster is ultimately not what a government calls it.
It is what a government is prepared to do about it.
*Ian Cameron MP is chair of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police
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