The vulnerability of joblessness manifests in ways most of us can hardly imagine.
In South Africa, unemployment is most often discussed through statistics and economic charts. The numbers are staggering. More than a third of the South African workforce, over eight million people, face the socio-economic vulnerability of joblessness. The horror of the numbers sometimes causes us to overlook something more intimate and disturbing: how joblessness strips away layers of safety, until people become vulnerable to many evils and predation in ways most of us never have to consider.
In his book The Profiler Diaries, forensic psychologist Dr Gérard Labuschagne writes about how serial murderers and rapists often use the same lie to lure potential victims: the promise of a job. According to a 2012 serial-rape study, 77% of victims were lured to the scene of their attack by a con story. In almost half of these cases, the con story was a promise of employment. Labuschagne notes that “patterns of behaviour between South African serial murderers and South African serial rapists are almost identical”.
From this, it is reasonable to understand that the con story of a potential job as bait extends to both categories of serial crime. It is a tactic that succeeds, Labuschagne notes, because our unemployment crisis has left millions, especially black women, with little choice but to take a risk when an “opportunity” appears. This is one of the most brutal and least-acknowledged consequences of the anti-jobs, anti-growth, fake-transformation policies that have kept the majority trapped in poverty and hopelessness. In a very real sense, the consequences of these policies are tangible, bloody, and evil.
Yet the problem of this dangerous vulnerability extends far beyond the morbidity of serial crimes. When jobs are scarce and there is no clear route to improving one’s circumstances, desperation reshapes how risk is calculated. Offers that would otherwise raise suspicion begin to look like lifelines. A phone call from a stranger, a meeting with someone promising a position, an invitation to sign paperwork in a quiet location – all become plausible when the alternative is continued destitution. Perhaps the most shocking thing about this modus operandi component of many serial murderers and rapists is that it seems to indicate that predators understand the reality of socio-economic desperation and vulnerability better than policymakers.
Glibly dismissed
The victims of these lies about job offers cannot be glibly dismissed as naive for “falling” for an unbelievable false promise. The psychological reality is cruel: desperation erodes caution. Without employment, savings, or any realistic path to earning a living, any graspable straw of survival pushes people into choices they would otherwise reject. This type of vulnerability is one of the many almost-unimaginable human costs of an economy unnecessarily constrained by decades of policy that slows growth and shuts out opportunity. It is the moral dimension of unemployment that is almost never addressed in speeches about “economic transformation”.
The reality is that fake transformation policies – race-based procurement rules that further enrich the connected elites, rigid labour laws that preserve vested interests or ideological antipathy to market competition, politically driven ownership quotas – have not delivered broad empowerment or mass job creation. Instead, they have entrenched insider networks, rewarded political connections over competence, and discouraged job-creating investment. The very people these measures claim to uplift remain excluded from real participation in the economy whilst paying a high price. There is no empowerment in preferential race-rigged public procurement that wastes valuable public money to enrich the politically connected elites. There is no transformation in rules that drive up the cost of doing business until hiring becomes impossible. And there is no dignity in a system that leaves millions so desperate that the bait of a fake job can lead them to the degradation of sexual violence, or death.
This vulnerability is not evenly spread. It falls hardest on women in poor communities, mostly black, who may have to travel long distances for interviews without safe transport, and with no reliable way to check whether an offer is genuine. When the broader economy is stagnant and opportunities are scarce, these women are pushed closer to the edge of risk – closer to making themselves vulnerable to fatal exploitation in the hope of an income of R2 800 per month – as was the case with the Muldersdrift serial rapist, Shavhani Lazzy Phophi.
Danger zone
Every anti-growth policy that drives away investment does not just shrink GDP or harm the South African investment case – it pushes more people into the danger zone, where vulnerability can become fatal and truly evil predators operate.
We should not see these sorts of crimes carried out with a modus operandi based on the promise of an income as isolated tragedies or morbid curiosities for the consumers of true crime literature. They are in fact the horrific symptoms of a structural injustice in which economic exclusion creates the conditions for brutal exploitation. Violent crime is usually framed as a policing or justice problem.
But in cases where the common con story of an offer of employment is the bait used to lure victims to their fate, unemployment becomes a predator’s weapon. In these cases, the injustice begins long before the attack, in the policies that create the desperation for employment – the poverty that makes the lure of a fake job so effective. That is why unemployment must be understood not just as an economic crisis, but as a crisis that destroys lives, either through the slowness of deprivation or even the horror of violent death.
Protecting the vulnerable therefore means creating an economy that works to empower through employment. This requires replacing fake transformation with genuine reform: an unambiguous open-opportunity, non-racial, pro-growth stance, which includes procurement focused on value for money rather than political rent-seeking, lower costs for consumers, fewer barriers for small businesses, competitive markets, skills training linked directly to jobs, and conditions that attract rather than repel investment.
Transformation must be measured not in quotas ticked off or tender values awarded, but in the number of people earning a living, supporting families, and escaping the desperation that has become a terrible vulnerability for dehumanising predators to exploit.
A job is more than an income, or a statistical basis for national pride or shame. A job alters how people navigate the world and how they make decisions about risk and reward. It allows them to refuse a dubious offer, verify an employer, and avoid unsafe travel. It restores agency, dignity and choice.
Sake of survival
Every job created is one fewer person forced to weigh dangerous options for the sake of survival. For unemployed women, especially in marginalised communities, this is not an abstract benefit – it is a matter of life and death. The human toll of unemployment is simply too massive to tolerate or perhaps even comprehend. But face this toll we simply must, if we are to turn the tide against the moral fraud of fake transformation policies.
The cruelty of the con story of a promised job, the bait of desperation, is made so much worse by the fact that it feeds on a deep-seated sense of hope for a better life, better socio-economic circumstances for oneself and one’s loved ones. The aspiration of struggling people is used against them. A woman steps into danger because she believes she is stepping toward a better life.
That hope should be protected as the basis for realising a better life, not left exposed to the vilest exploitation imaginable. Every day that anti-growth policies remain in place, this hope remains undefended. When fake transformation masquerades as progress, or when a predator masquerades as a source of employment, more people are pushed into fatal vulnerability.
Job creation is therefore simply not just an economic objective. It is in almost every sense a shield against exploitation. It is the foundation of personal safety for those who have nothing else to fall back on – and its absence is the sinister opposite. Until South Africa replaces the policies that suffocate growth with those that open opportunity, we will keep counting the cost of unemployment not only in rands and cents, but in lives lost to the cruellest kinds of predatory exploitation.
Those who still defend the failed policies of the status quo, promising jobs but inflicting suffering, should face a harsh and uncomfortable truth: their anti-growth, anti-jobs politics puts them in the same moral company as the predators who use false hope to lure, exploit, and harm the most vulnerable among us. How much longer can we as a country live with the reality that the hopeful and desperate promise of a job has become such a standard part of how predators isolate their victims?
As long as anti-jobs, anti-growth policies deny South Africans the real promise of a job, rapists and murderers will have the chance to lure vulnerable people to hells of unimaginable horror – with the deceitful promise of a job as bait.
[Image: Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash]
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