As Ekurhuleni grapples with a string of murders, the urgent question is whether these killings are another expression of GBV or something darker: a predator hunting women.
By Themba Khumalo
Nine murdered women in Ekurhuleni over two short months. On a page, it is a number; in nine homes, it is a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend whose place at the table will never be filled again.
That is why these killings cannot be reduced to a statistic. They are a nightmare that has already entered the lives of nine families and the streets of an entire community.
The sheer, terrifying reality of these killings ought to strike us like a bolt of thunder. Families are shattered, communities gripped by panic, and somewhere out there, a killer—or killers—may still be watching, choosing, and hunting.
Yet, as the body count rises, our national conversation has drifted into a strangely predictable groove.
Almost immediately, the dialogue settled into the well-worn vocabulary of Gender-Based Violence and femicide. On Metro FM, a host pressed callers with the familiar refrain: Where are the men when women are dying? It is an understandable instinct. South Africa is battered by an undeniable crisis of male violence against women, and no sane person is asking for men to be let off the hook.
But as I listened, a far darker, far more immediate question kept cutting through the noise: What if we are staring at a serial predator and refusing to call him by his name?
To be clear, questioning the framing is not a denial of GBV, nor is it an attempt to minimise the violence women face in this country. It is a demand that we do not allow a familiar explanation to get ahead of the investigation.
GBV and femicide speak to the gendered nature of violence and the circumstances in which women are targeted because of their gender. Serial murder describes something different: a pattern of separate killings committed by the same offender, often involving a particular method of finding, approaching and disposing of victims. These categories can overlap, but they should never be treated as though they mean the same thing. A serial killer can target women because they are women, in which case those murders may also constitute femicide. But the fact that the victims are women cannot, by itself, establish the motive for their deaths.
That matters because motive is not a detail we can afford to assume.
When nine women are murdered in the same geographic pocket within weeks, the primary question is not political—it is forensic. How are these victims being selected? What connects their final moments? Is there a common signature? Are there similarities in how they disappeared or where their bodies were found? Is the same man coming back for a tenth?
Those questions are not a rejection of the GBV conversation. They are the questions that have to be answered if we are serious about stopping whoever is responsible.
When we instantly fold every murder of a woman into the generic blanket of “another GBV crisis”, we do something dangerous: we trade investigative precision for social commentary.
Activists and radio hosts cannot catch a serial killer. Slogans do not analyse DNA. Outrage does not map out body-dump sites or cross-reference CCTV footage. That work belongs to detectives, pathologists and behavioural specialists obsessing over microscopic details, sometimes spending months trying to establish a connection that is invisible to everybody else.
And there is a reason we need to distinguish these crimes.
If a man murders his partner out of domestic control, possessiveness, coercion, or gendered violence, the circumstances surrounding that killing tell investigators something about the relationship between victim and perpetrator. If a stranger is systematically stalking and abducting women off the streets of Ekurhuleni, investigators are confronted with an entirely different threat: an offender selecting victims outside an intimate relationship, developing a method and potentially repeating it.
Both crimes can be horrific. Both can involve violence against women. But they do not necessarily have the same motive, the same offender profile or the same investigative response.
Conflating the two does not make us more compassionate; it makes us sloppy.
There is a cruel irony in how quickly we turn these murdered women into props for our pre-existing debates. We plead with society not to reduce women to numbers, yet we immediately turn these nine human beings into a collective exhibit for a national argument about patriarchy.
Each of these women had a name, a life and a story. Each had people who loved her, worried about her and expected her to come home. And right now, each of their deaths may also contain evidence that could help investigators understand what is happening.
The circumstances surrounding their deaths could reveal a method, a route, a connection between cases or a behavioural pattern. They could ultimately point towards a killer before he strikes again.
That is why I cannot shake the feeling that something important is being lost in the way we are discussing this.
We are understandably horrified by violence against women, but our horror should not prevent us from asking whether we are dealing with something more specific and potentially even more immediate: a calculated offender who may be hunting victims according to a pattern that investigators have not yet fully uncovered.
If that is what is happening, then every minute matters.
The question of GBV will remain. The question of femicide will remain. The responsibility of men to confront violence against women will remain. None of those conversations disappears because we ask whether these killings are connected.
But neither should the possibility of a serial killer disappear because we are more comfortable discussing the killings through the familiar language of activism.
So yes, ask where the men are. Demand that men do better. Condemn femicide with everything you have.
But right now, in Ekurhuleni, there is a far more urgent question that transcends activism, gender and ideology: Where is the person who killed these women?
Before we tell ourselves what these deaths mean, we need to know what happened. Before we turn victims into political symbols, we must let the evidence speak. If there is a serial killer walking those streets, the most vital question is not which social framework best describes our outrage; it is whether we can catch him before the next family gets a call.