In a 2016 study of Diepsloot, 56% of men surveyed admitted to raping or beating a women in the previous 12 months – a lack of policing is just the start of the problem

The violence usually starts on a Thursday night, worsens on a Friday and reaches a peak over Saturday into the early hours of the morning. At the start of spring in September, temperatures rise and tempers flare. By the hot, heady weeks of the festive season in December, domestic abuse reaches its worst, outdoing the incidents of violence that have become common over long weekends throughout the year. In Diepsloot, an impoverished community north west of Johannesburg, gender-based violence has become so common that it follows a recognisable pattern.

Some would survive if a car comes by while they are raping her or before she was killed Brown Lekekela

Brown Lekekela has barely taken a weekend or holiday off since starting the Green Door shelter in the heart of the community. It’s a safe space women can run to in the middle of the night – or sometimes in the middle of the day – if they are experiencing abuse from their partners.

“There were incidents of women being killed on the street,” said Lekekela, who used to work as a volunteer at the local police station. “Some would survive if a car comes by while they are raping her or before she was killed.”

Lekekela heard a version of this story so many times that he started his own shelter, a halfway way house literally situated between the community and the police station. In a neighbourhood where the 3km walk to the police station can be deadly, the Green Door is not so much a doorway as a tall gate built into an even taller concrete wall – the kind South Africans refer to as a “stop nonsense.” Behind it, in Lekekela’s front yard, is a wooden shed with beds and basin; a safe place where women can report abuse.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brown Lekekela started his own shelter for women, the Green Door, behind secure fencing in a shed in his front yard. Photograph: Delwyn Verasamy/Mail & Guardian

In a country with high rates of gender-based violence, Diepsloot has come to represent the convergence of all the factors contributing to abuse against women. In 2016, a University of the Witwatersrand study sampling 2,600 local men found that 56% of them admitted to either raping or beating a woman in the previous 12 months. These sorts of statistics have made the neighbourhood a microcosm of South Africa’s social ills that lend themselves to high rates of gender violence. It has also attracted a slew of social science researchers, NGOs, and journalists – including one controversial BBC documentary – trying to find solutions to Diepsloot’s troubles.

Diepsloot is in many ways representative of South Africa’s post-apartheid struggle. The settlement was founded in 1995, a year after South Africa became a democracy. It was meant to be a temporary shelter for about 200 families evicted from squatter camps in nearby Honeydew and other neighbourhoods. Then more evicted families arrived. Their settlement merged with another existing community on what was once farmland around northwest Johannesburg. Soon, migrants from around the country arrived, and then from around southern Africa. Today, Diepsloot has an estimated population of between 350,000 and 400,000 people, living in a district divided into 12 “extensions”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lekekela set up the Green in response to the reports of violence he heard as a police volunteer. Photograph: Delwyn Verasamy/Mail & Guardian

The South African government began building more formal homes in 1999, but construction could not keep up with the demands of rapid urbanisation. As a consequence, Diepsloot is a mix of public housing block cottages, and shacks made of corrugated iron and plastic lining, residents reliant on outbuildings for sanitation. The few buildings that rise above a single storey include an evangelical church and a loan office. While the main road is paved, on the side streets tar gives way to gravel, ditches and stagnant water.

Remnants of apartheid-era planning and the density of the areamean that the streets are a maze, lacking a formalised layout. An unreliable electricity grid means street lighting is unpredictable. The township is surrounded by open fields and farms, while the closest neighbourhoods are wealthy gated communities.

This geography makes it both easier for a perpetrator to evade police and potentially fatal for a woman trying to escape or report violence. The roads are too narrow for a police van, and officers are often too afraid to patrol on foot. If they take the risk and leave the car unattended, it is very likely to be vandalised.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest South African protesters march against gender-based violence in September 2019 following the rape and murder of UCT student Uyinene Mrwetyana in Cape Town. Photograph: Gallo Images/Gallo Images via Getty Images

“It’s really a lack of perpetrator accountability that really allows crimes of all kind, but gender-based violence as well, to fester,” said Lindsay Henson, executive director of Lawyers Against Abuse. The NGO works out of a sweltering container in Diepsloot’s extension 2, sharing the lot with two other non-profits, a doctor’s surgery and a creche. On this particular day, the electricity in the area is out and the smell of sewage wafts in. Established in 2014, the organisation offers support to survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence and child abuse.

In 2016 Diepsloot built a new police station costing an estimated 105 million rand (£5.5m). Standing at the head of Diepsloot’s main street, and arguably the tallest building in the area, its looming presence has made residents feel safer. The introduction of holding cells has made the threat of arrest more concrete, but has not quite solved the problem of on-the-ground policing. Survivors still have to accompany detectives to identify their abusers, meaning that reporting violence is still dangerous.

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The factors contributing to the high rates of violence in Diepsloot are complex and run the psychosocial gamut, from poverty and unemployment to intergenerational violence and childhood trauma, explains Henderson. The particular geography of Diepsloot makes it difficult to protect survivors. The nearest public hospital is more than 30km away, the nearest court nearly 20km away.

When unplanned urban communities spring up and mushroom in the way that Diepsloot has, providing basic services like policing is a constant game of catch-up. The murder rate in Diepsloot remains high, while sexual offences and contact crimes are on the increase. While this increase can at least partially be attributed to better rates of reporting crime, it shows that policing is not a panacea for South Africa’s high rates of gender-based violence.



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