By Nco Dube | 18 September 2026

Nine women’s bodies have been found in and around Ekurhuleni over the past two months. There are fears that a serial killer may be operating in the area, although police have not established that the murders are linked. Women are frightened. Families are frightened. And somehow, part of the public conversation has become an argument about whether women should have been warned to take care when running alone. 

The police warning provoked anger. Some women asked why the instruction always seems to fall on them: do not run alone, do not go out late, watch where you walk, tell someone where you are going. Why, they asked, is the warning directed at women rather than at the men who rape and kill them?

Other people, many of them men, thought this response was unreasonable. If there is a possible killer on the loose, surely the police must alert those who may be in danger. Telling a killer to stop will not protect someone going for a run tomorrow morning.

Taken on its own, that is a fair point. But it answers a narrower question than the one women are asking.

A woman can heed an urgent warning and resent the life that makes the warning necessary. She can want the police to tell her what they know while asking why the burden of adapting to violence falls so predictably on her. The warning concerns what she does tomorrow morning. Her anger concerns all the mornings before it, and all the ordinary freedoms she has already surrendered.

When we respond to that anger by explaining the practical value of a warning, we may feel we have won the argument. We have probably missed the conversation.

I understood this more clearly after speaking to my daughter Ayola. What struck me was not simply her fear, but her frustration with men who regard themselves as the good ones. We will organise, protest and speak forcefully about many injustices. We know how to demand accountability when we believe something important is under threat. Yet women look at the scale of violence committed against them and ask where that same collective determination has gone.

Ayola made a particularly uncomfortable comparison. Black men were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. How, then, can we appear so helpless in confronting violence committed by men in our own families and communities against our mothers, partners, sisters and daughters?

Historical comparisons are never exact, and no one person carries responsibility for the actions of every other man. But that is hardly a sufficient answer to her challenge. 

If we are capable of recognising an injustice as a collective concern, why does violence against women so quickly become a matter of individual innocence? Why is “not all men…” so often where our contribution ends?

Innocence is a beginning

A man who does not abuse women has met a basic obligation. He has not, by that fact alone, become an ally.

The harder questions concern what happens around us. What do we do when a friend repeatedly humiliates his partner in public? When a relative’s threats are dismissed as a domestic dispute? When a colleague tells us a woman is lying because the man she has accused has always been decent to us? When boys learn, through jokes and silences, that a girl’s boundaries are negotiable?

Most violence does not arrive without a history. There are often people who saw enough to be concerned and found a reason to look away. Men who would never strike a woman can still provide the social shelter in which another man’s behaviour goes unchallenged.

This is where we should direct some of the energy we spend defending ourselves online. Speak to the friend. Refuse the joke. Stop treating a woman’s account as a threat to your friendship with the man she has named. Support her access to help without taking control of what she does next. Teach sons, by example, that a woman’s refusal does not diminish them.

These actions are less dramatic than a declaration that men must do better. They may cost us more.

There is also an obligation on institutions. A community cannot ask women to report violence and then leave them facing indifference, intimidation or a process that exposes them to further harm. The investigation into the Ekurhuleni deaths must be thorough and accountable. Police warnings must be accompanied by visible police work, credible updates and serious attention to the places where people feel unsafe. Men should be pressing for that response alongside women, not appearing chiefly when there is an argument to be had about the wording of a warning.

Listen before offering to lead

The language of protection can itself become a problem if we are careless with it. Men announce that they will protect women, then decide what protection should look like without asking the women concerned. Sometimes it means telling them when to go out, how to dress or how much freedom to surrender. The burden moves back to women, now in the name of keeping them safe.

A useful ally begins with a different question: What are women telling us about the danger they face, and what is within our power to change?

That requires listening without immediately qualifying what we hear. Many men struggle at this point. A woman describes her fear of men and we rush to remind her that not all men are violent. She already knows that. She may have a father, brother, friend or partner she loves. She is telling us that knowing some good men has not made her safe from the others, and that she cannot always tell which man will become dangerous.

We should be able to hear that without asking her to soothe our discomfort first.

Listening also means accepting that women will not all express their anger in the same way. Some will welcome a public safety warning; others will hear, in yet another instruction to be careful, the accumulated exhaustion of years spent managing men’s violence. We do not need to settle which woman has responded correctly before taking either one seriously.

Nor should men ask women to open up to us as proof that the gender divide is healing. Trust cannot be demanded from someone who has learned caution through experience. We earn it by being consistent: believing women enough to act, challenging men we know, and remaining present after public attention moves elsewhere.

This does not mean every disagreement between women and men must end. Honest disagreement is possible. But the social media gender war rewards the quickest retort and the broadest accusation. It asks each side to answer for the worst thing someone else has said. In that contest, women’s deaths become the backdrop to an argument about men’s feelings and women’s tone.

We can refuse that contest. We can say that women need reliable information about immediate risks, and that it is intolerable for their freedom to keep shrinking around those risks. We can demand competent policing while examining the conduct men excuse in our homes, friendships and institutions. We can acknowledge fear without making women responsible for the violence they fear.

My daughter did not ask me to win an argument on behalf of good men. She asked, in effect, what our goodness is worth if women cannot count on it when it becomes difficult.

That question should stay with us long after the argument over the warning has faded. Women should be able to run, work, travel and come home without calculating which ordinary choice might expose them to violence. Until they can, men have work to do. The measure of our alliance will be what women experience in their lives, not what we say about ourselves.