Why South Africa's Violence Problem Is Bigger Than The People Who Commit It
When violence shocks a society, one of the first questions is usually about the person responsible. What kind of person could do this? Were there warning signs? Was there something psychologically different about them? These are understandable questions, particularly when crimes are brutal or appear to repeat. But focusing too narrowly on the offender can obscure a harder possibility: violence is also shaped by the society in which it occurs.
South Africa's history makes that distinction especially important. Clinical psychologist Professor Garth Stevens describes violence as having functioned for generations as a social instrument, used both to subjugate and to resist. That does not mean history mechanically produces today's violent offender. It means violence has occupied an unusually familiar place in the country's political and social imagination. Stevens describes this legacy as a kind of "wound of history".
History, however, is only one layer. Extreme inequality, unemployment, weakened institutions and failures of governance can alter the environment in which violence occurs. Institutions matter partly because they impose boundaries: the police, courts, schools, social services, families and community structures all help determine what behaviour is restrained, punished, tolerated or normalised. When those systems become inconsistent or lose legitimacy, the consequences extend beyond service delivery. They change what people believe will happen after rules are broken.
That is why South Africa's response to violence cannot be reduced to policing alone. The criminal justice system remains essential, particularly when lives are at risk, but prevention starts much earlier and extends much further. It includes whether children learn that aggression is strength, whether men are socialised into entitlement, whether abusive behaviour is challenged before it escalates, whether rehabilitation works, and whether somebody leaving prison has a realistic route back into ordinary life.
This wider lens is particularly important when examining violence against women. Stevens argues that misogyny can become more dangerous when it is combined with entitlement and objectification. Once another person is regarded less as an autonomous human being and more as an object over which power can be exercised, the psychological distance to violence can shrink. His argument is not that misogynistic thinking automatically produces physical violence; it is that attitudes, power and socialisation are part of the environment in which violence becomes possible.
That systemic argument is increasingly reflected in South Africa's institutional response to gender-based violence and femicide. Government's October 2026 recovery plan places policing alongside investigation, forensic processing, prosecution, community safety and challenges to harmful social attitudes. A separate national inquiry is examining how the criminal justice system handles reporting, victim support, investigation and pre-trial processes in GBV cases. In other words, even the formal response increasingly recognises that violence cannot be isolated to the moment of the offence. South African Government
Psychology adds another necessary caution. Risk factors are not destiny. Stevens rejects the idea of an inevitable line between a difficult childhood, particular personality traits and future violence. Some indicators can increase risk, but prediction is not certainty. The same principle applies to criminal profiling: patterns
can assist investigators, but the moment a profile becomes a stereotype, investigators risk seeing only evidence that confirms what they already expect.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that reducing violence requires two kinds of work at once. South Africa needs institutions capable of finding, prosecuting and managing dangerous offenders. But it also needs to confront the historical, economic, institutional and gendered conditions in which violence is repeatedly reproduced. Catching the person who commits an act of violence is justice. Building a society in which fewer people reach that point is prevention.
References
· Professor Garth Stevens, conversation with Randall Abrahams, Both Sides, October 2026. · South African Government, Government on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide, 1 October 2026. South African Government
· Commission for Gender Equality, SAHRC and CRL Rights Commission, Joint National Inquiry into the
· criminal justice system response to GBVF, August 2026.
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