I'm struggling today.

I'm South African. We're having a national women's shutdown today against Gender Based Violence and Femicide.

I'm seeing posts all over the place about it. Talking about how the epidemic of Femicide needs to be declared a national disaster. About the 15 women a day murdered in South Africa. How women are disproportionately affected by violence etc.

I'm with them up till that last bit.

I mean its not just now, there are often newspaper articles about GBV, billboards etc. We have 16 days of activism every year against GBV, which is very well advertised. The president and MPs often talk about the scourge of GBV etc.

Nobody cares about the men.

And if I bring it up I'm confronted with abuse, ad hominem attacks, lots of people calling me stupid and lots of people telling me its not the right time to talk about that now. (It's never the right time).

Here's the stats on murder (From the South African Police Service's annual report):

Total murders (year ending 31 Mar 24) : 27,590

Female victims: 3,485 (12.63%)

Child victims: 1,164 (4.22%)

Male Victims: Not mentioned in the report, but we can calculate the balance there is 22,941 or 83.15%.

If I bring up that men are 6.6 times more likely to be murdered than women I get victim blaming, talking about most of those murders being gang and crime related. As if the boys growing up in bad neighborhoods with no money or prospects in the Cape flats and getting recruited into gangs in their tweens and teens to die on the street in a war over territory or go back and forth between prison and the street aren't victims?

Or that great one 'Who is killing these men?'. The idea being that men are killing men, so somehow it just cancels itself out. The only thing that matters is that men are killing women. Women aren't killing men, so...

I also get told that women are being killed by their partners and women aren't doing that to men.

The stats from a reply to a question from the EFF in Parliament by our Police Minister Senzo Mchunu were that between 2019 and 2024, 1736 females were killed by their partners while 1507 males were killed by their partners. So females were 53.5% of the victims of Intimate Partner Murders.

Then I get told about rapes and sexual assault and such and unfortunately these stats are always under-reported and especially under-reported to the police. There's also the problem that there is very little research done into male victims.

But I have found one study. This study was done in 2002, published in 2008 so quite dated, with a total of 269,705 learners aged 10–19 years in grades 6–11. Of these, 126,696 were male. These learners were from 1191 schools all over the country at different economic levels. It found that:

Some 9% (weighted value based on 13915/127097) of male respondents aged 11–19 years reported forced sex in the last year. Of those aged 18 years at the time of the survey, 44% (weighted value of 5385/11450) said they had been forced to have sex in their lives and 50% reported consensual sex. Perpetrators were most frequently an adult not from their own family, followed closely in frequency by other schoolchildren. Some 32% said the perpetrator was male, 41% said she was female and 27% said they had been forced to have sex by both male and female perpetrators. Male abuse of schoolboys was more common in rural areas while female perpetration was more an urban phenomenon.

So while these numbers in themselves are crazy high, I believe the numbers for women are quite a bit higher. We do have a crisis in this country. But it's not gender based. And male victims are just completely erased.

But any time I try and push for a little bit of empathy, I get abuse and treated like I'm saying the women's deaths don't matter or that I only care about the men. Which isn't true.

Thanks for listening to my rant.