South African police issued safety messaging urging women not to walk or run alone following the nine deaths in the Ekurhuleni area. The messaging is framed as protective: reduce exposure, reduce risk. Advocates named the specific problem with that framing.

THE ADVOCATE COUNTER  

One advocate’s direct statement to Al Jazeera: ‘You are basically telling us to adjust our lives to perpetrators.’ The National Shelter Movement of South Africa: ‘The responsibility for violence lies with perpetrators, while the responsibility for protection lies with society and the state.’

ONYX covers both statements in their confirmed content. The advocate analysis: safety messaging that instructs women to change their behavior relocates the burden of preventing violence from the perpetrators who commit it to the victims who might experience it. Elizabeth Moselakgomo went for her regular run near an airport in a city where femicide has been a national disaster for a year. The police response to her death is advice to other women to run differently.

THE STRUCTURAL COUNTER-ARGUMENT  

The advocates’ argument is not that safety awareness is irrelevant. It is that safety awareness as the primary institutional response to a femicide rate five times the global average is not a structural solution to a structural problem. The National Shelter Movement’s statement names the specific structural responsibility: ‘society and the state.’ The state has declared the problem a national disaster. The question the advocates are asking is what structural change follows that declaration.

The police told women not to run alone. Elizabeth Moselakgomo went for her regular run and did not come home. The memorial run held in her honor was a group of people running together. They carried a banner that said ‘Enough. Stop Femicide.’ The community answered the police advice with the specific answer that the advice misses: the problem is not that women run alone. The problem is that women are killed when they do.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT  

▸  Government structural response — what structural measures follow the behavioral messaging

▸  National Shelter Movement demands — what specific state interventions the advocates are calling for

CONFIDENCE: HIGH

Police safety messaging: women not to run alone; advocates: ‘adjust our lives to perpetrators’ Al Jazeera; National Shelter Movement: ‘responsibility lies with perpetrators, society, state’ from confirmed reporting.

SOURCES

▸  Al Jazeera — South Africa police women safety messaging September 20, 2026