The women pictured above are all dead, they were allegedly killed by their partners.
JOHANNESBURG - Reeva Steenkamp, Jayde Panayiotou, Fatima Patel, Anni Dewani, Zanele Khumalo, Dolly Tshabalala.
These are the names of women, which made headlines the last few years and they all have one thing in common.
They are all dead.
They lost their lives thanks to the person closest to them, the man they trusted and loved more than any other man.
Steenkamp and Khumalo were both killed by their boyfriends. The ANC women’s league said in both instances that the murderers should have got harsher sentences.
The families of Panayiotou, Tshabalala and Patel are still waiting to hear if they will get justice for the murder of their loved ones.
Christopher Panayiotou allegedly organised a hitman to kill his wife Jayde. He will face trial in 2016.
Rameez Patel is also awaiting trial for the murder of his wife Fatima. Her family barely recognized her when she was found in their Polokwane home in April.
Patel was out on R250,000 bail when he was rearrested in July for another murder which allegedly took place in July 2013.
Tshabalala was stabbed to death allegedly by her boyfriend, popular Jozi FM DJ Donal Sebolai. He is currently on trial for her murder.
Anni Hindocha’s family didn’t get justice for her killing as the state couldn’t provide enough evidence to convict her husband Shrien Dewani for conspiring to commit the murder.
The families of Panayiotou, Tshabalala and Patel will face the same verdict in those trials, or they will have to endure a lifetime of pain, like the Hindocha family.
On 8 December 2014, Ami Denborg said the following outside the Western Cape High Court.
"We just wish Shrien had been honest with us and especially Anni.”
"The knowledge of not ever knowing what happened to my dearest little sister on 13 November 2010; that is going to haunt me, my family, my brother, my parents, for the rest of our lives,” she said.
A November 2014 report by the Institute for Security Studies on domestic violence in South Africa states that its difficult to assess the extent of which violence against women occurs in the country because incidents are not being tracked efficiently.
“Data on the full extent of all forms of domestic violence in South Africa is not available.,” writes the author of the report, researcher Lisa Vetten.
Three women are killed by their partners in South Africa every day.
The second most common cause of these deaths occurs when women decide to end their relationships.
In the conclusion of the report, Vetten writes that the uninformative nature of police statistics needs to be addressed.
“While it may not be legally practicable to create one crime of domestic violence (given the different acts this would conflate), it is possible for the police to record the relationship between the perpetrator and victim and to routinely report on this,” she said.
The report also includes detailed statistics on the protection orders in South Africa.
It suggests that the reason for the low number of protection orders made final is because women fail to return to court.
Interviews with 365 such women from four courts in the Western Cape found that :
In more than one-third of cases the abuse had stopped following the application, regardless of whether the order had been served on or signed by the respondent.
On receipt of the order, one in five women reported that the respondent had ‘promised’ to stop the abuse.
10% of women indicated that the respondent had begged and pleaded for the applicant not to go back and finalise the order.
The following infographic shows statistics of protection orders:
