Amnesty International South Africa is urgently calling on the State to recognise femicide as a distinct crime, warning that failure to do so leaves the targeted killing of women largely unaddressed.

Femicide, defined as the gender-motivated killing of a woman because she is a woman, is currently not classified as a separate offence under South African law.

Instead, these deaths are categorised under general murder statistics, a practice that advocates argue masks the systemic nature of the crisis.

South Africa continues to grapple with some of the highest femicide rates globally.

According to the latest annual crime statistics, 5 578 women were murdered between 2023 and 2024 – an average of roughly 15 women killed every day.

Despite these stark numbers, the true scale of the violence remains obscured. The South African Police Service (SAPS) has not published disaggregated crime data regarding the murder and assault of women and children since August 2025, citing internal accuracy concerns that require investigation.

Amnesty International South Africa executive director Shenilla Mohamed emphasised that treating femicide as standard murder ignores the patterns of gender-based violence that typically precede it, such as stalking, rape, and intimate partner violence.

Without a distinct legal category, these warning signs are tracked as isolated incidents.

"You cannot fix what you are not tracking," Mohamed stated, noting that reliable data is a vital prerequisite for State accountability.

While criminalisation alone will not instantly halt the violence, Amnesty International argued it provides a critical mechanism to hold the government accountable.

Legally defining the crime would compel the State to allocate dedicated resources specifically tailored to combating and preventing femicide, track accurate, gender-disaggregated data to identify high-risk patterns and confront systemic failures in current institutional protection measures for women and girls.

Mohamed said 33 countries have criminalised femicide.

In Africa, only Gabon and Morocco have codified it into law.

Amnesty International South Africa maintained that by failing to join these nations and properly record these targeted killings, the South African State is actively failing to protect its citizens from the most extreme manifestation of gender discrimination and inequality.