On 11 December, on the heels of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence, the Urban Safety Reference Group (USRG) launched the 5th edition of its biennial State of Urban Safety in South Africa Report. The Report also follows the release of a study by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), sounding the alarm on the rise in gender-based violence (GBV) against women aged 18 to 24, regardless of partnership status, but with perpetrators often being men who are not their romantic partners. Significantly more women aged 18–24 experienced physical violence in the past 12 months than those aged 50 years and older. A substantially higher proportion of women aged 25 – 34 experienced recent sexual violence compared to women in the 35 – 49 age band.
Just weeks before the release of the USRG’s Report, the South African Police Service issued the latest crime statistics covering the 2023/24 period. The Minister of Police also revealed, amid the shocking, live-streamed murder of Nontobeko Cele by her intimate partner, that in the period October to mid-December 2024, 110 women had been murdered in the KZN Province alone. One could then question the value or usefulness of the USRG still issuing a Report covering the 2022/23 cycle. However, the case for a city-level view of crime and violence remains strong. The USRG, with this report, marks 10 years of partnership, collaboration, and research that justifies a particular focus on urban centres.
Cities need special attention because they are economic hubs and places of opportunity, and they have unique challenges (coupled with special powers and functions to address those) that account for a large portion of the most concerning crime types. Of note in the HSRC study is that experiences of physical /or sexual violence were highest among black African women and women residing in urban areas, in particular. This points to a need for city governments to intervene in specific ways to reduce crime and violence and end GBV so that urban space, society and economy no longer relegate women to the peripheries. Cities must intentionally express women’s rights to the city and reap the benefits of living in cities.
The State of Urban Safety in South Africa Report 2024 itself states that the nine cities it profiles, where 44% of the population live, account for 51% of all murders, 37% of assault GBH, 39% of all reported sexual offences, 47% of business robberies,75% of vehicle and motorcycle thefts and an astounding 75% of car hijackings.
The Reports remain a critical input because they provide an incremental and retrospective evidence base enabling cities to plan, budget and implement as informed by evidence. They illuminate quite strongly on what is not shown by national crime statistics. SAPS data is based on police station precinct boundaries, showing only what is reported to police or detected by police action. It occludes or does not show the distribution of crime incidents by location in a city. Neither do they give a sense of what the drivers are. The USRG indicator tool, on the other hand, overlays municipal boundaries, population data, as well as social and structural risk factors such as family disruption, basic service and infrastructure deprivation, which dramatically change how we understand and respond to urban violence and crime. Framing urban crime and violence as not just a policing issue but as socially, economically and spatially driven has revolutionised how South African Cities that participate in the USRG respond and manage urban safety.
Being the 10th year of the USRG, a platform for city practitioners and other entities responsible for community safety, Report 2024 also takes a reflective tone on the state of urban safety practice and the small but impactful efforts of the USRG to foster partnership approaches where all functions in a city and across government spheres, understand their contribution to a safe city. As a frame for reflection, the report considers four themes, which are aspects the USRG considers critical sites of intervention to promote safer cities and achieve a reduction in urban crime and violence.
The ’ evidence-driven safety practice’ theme argues for more city capacity to collect, analyse, and apply crowdsourced or community-led data through sub-city-level safety audits, victims’ surveys, and other means. This is an important supplement considering deterrents or barriers victims might face in reporting sexual assault, for example. Evidence is essential in general for decision-making, particularly how safety is budgeted for.
The report also looks at ‘working together’ – a deep engagement with transversal city safety mandates and fostering a better understanding of how different functions in a city contribute. It considers communications essential in fostering a shared view of and responsibility for safety within a city administration and with communities. Lastly, it reflects on the state of partnering and practical ways cities can be better, more trustworthy partners.
Space is a critical site of intervention. Cities are custodians of the public realm and can intervene creatively if they invest sustainably, meaning in both the hard and soft things. Long-term social interventions such as parenting and ECD programmes, side-by-side with the investment of hard infrastructure, are designed to follow user needs and experiences of space rather than exacerbate unsafety. The ‘area-based safety interventions’ theme explores how we can build safer neighbourhoods and a precinct-level approach to safety, prioritising community engagement as a building block to community ownership of city space and public infrastructure. It begins to peel the layers of the cost of crime and of not investing in the right things at the right time.
The ‘gendered safety lens’ theme talks to the state of GBV and GBV prevention and how cities can lead, leveraging their powers and functions around space and the economy. It argues that cities that are safe for women are safe for all and that cities are responsible for improving safety through their planning, economic development, public space, public works, waste management, electrification/lighting, communications, and by-law enforcement functions, among others.
To the extent that safety is fundamentally a developmental as well as economic question, it’s critical to consider the above themes together, especially GBV and city-led, public-space-based responses to it.
USRG’s experience and focus on GBV prevention suggest cities should invest more robustly in area-based interventions. This should not just be to improve public safety and the public realm for their own sake but be designed explicitly for economic impacts and the participation of women in urban economies. Public space is a catalyst for increasing the hours that women are economically active, as is shown in the USRG’s intervention in Hammanskraal, which engaged quite deeply with street trader organisations and the plight of women in this sector. Area-based interventions designed for enhanced women’s economic activity can also have a significant impact at the household level in enabling women to escape harmful and dangerous situations. Similarly, social interventions that focus, for example, on ECD services along trading routes can also meet the needs of women with respect to childcare so that they can be economically active for longer.
The State of Urban Safety in South Africa Report 2024 highlights 10 years of collective cities’ advocacy for institutionally supported, evidence-informed, area-based, GBV-preventive and gender-transformative safety practice. It clarifies and gives a tangible sense of how safety is not just about a state of security but an intersection of things that culminate in whether we feel safe or unsafe; that safety is also about our sensory experience of the public realm: what it sounds, feels, looks and smells like when we feel safe.
Looking forward, the USRG enters 2025, compelled by the deep reflections and lessons contained in Report 2024, to deepen its focus on GBV, moving beyond just public space to engage with the urban economy as a key site to end GBV and women’s marginalisation in urban society.
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Siphelele Ngobese is a Senior Researcher at the South African Cities Network (SACN); to contact her, email siphelele@sacities.net