The murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, struck a raw nerve across continents.
A 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee had fled the devastation of Kyiv only to be stabbed to death on a commuter line in the United States. All that gruesome footage was seen on video. The tragedy was, on its face, senseless. No quarrel, no robbery, no motive that the authorities have yet explained, other than the murderer being heard muttering on CCTV footage “I got that white girl”.
It was impossible not to feel the injustice. Newspapers across the world reported on the murals, her studies, her dreams. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, offered to pay for murals in her honour. Politicians spoke of transit safety and mental health. On social media, strangers mourned her as though they had known her. And in truth, we did know her in the way one knows a type: the earnest migrant, hard-working, hopeful, paying her dues in a new land. The human face behind the abstraction of “refugee crisis” which the West is facing.
But as South Africans, one can’t help finding a grim familiarity. The details are different, the accent is not the same, yet the rhythm of the story is instantly recognisable. A woman caught unawares in a place that should have been safe. A sudden act of brutality against a vulnerable person and now a family left mourning. For us as South Africans, this is not unusual. It is routine.
Which is why, in remembering Zarutska, I think we owe it to ourselves to remember our own dead. Not because her life was worth less, it was worth just as much, but because the mourning she received abroad is a tribute denied to too many women here at home.
Consider, for instance, Thimna Kuze, a 13-year-old girl from Khayelitsha. In March 2023 she went to sleep at a friend’s house. The next day she was found lifeless in a shack, with injuries no child should ever bear. Her case has been delayed repeatedly due to equipment failures, overbooked courts, endless postponements. The man accused of her rape and murder sits in prison while the calendar drags on, justice endlessly deferred. Thimna’s name rarely makes the national news. There is no outpouring of solidarity from foreign politicians. The silence is deafening.
Or take Nadia Lotz, a mother of three, murdered in 2023 allegedly by her partner of fourteen years. According to testimony, he slit her throat in a car and stabbed her repeatedly as she tried to escape. Her trial too has stuttered forward in increments. The family waits. The children grow up with a hole where their mother used to be. And society shrugs.
And then there is Nosiphiwo James, a 29-year-old stabbed to death with a screwdriver by her boyfriend in Khayelitsha,. She left behind two young children. Action Society had to employ private investigators to track down the fugitive partner when police resources faltered. An NGO is hiring detectives so that the state can do its job.
These three names are only a sample. There are many more: Melany Stoffels, killed with a hammer while pregnant; Aster, a 14-year-old girl raped by a pastor; little Poppy, four years old, allegedly molested by the man who was supposed to drive her to crèche. Each story could fill its own article. Each is part of a grim picture that runs through our daily life, often unnoticed, except by the families who must endure the long slog through a justice system that seems structurally incapable of urgency.
Why do some deaths become headlines while others remain footnotes? Partly, it’s geography. Americans take notice when violence erupts on their own commuter trains, because public transport is not supposed to be a killing field. A refugee killed on U.S. soil makes for a global morality tale. But a woman strangled in a shack in Mfuleni? That is too ordinary. Too common to stir outrage beyond her community.
The irony is that South Africa’s epidemic of gender-based violence dwarfs the isolated incident in Charlotte. According to the South African Police Service’s own figures, over 10 000 cases of rape are reported each quarter. That’s not counting the vast number that go unreported. Murders of women and children are rising, not falling. The problem is therefore not sporadic. It is systemic.
And yet, the rhythm of response is numbing. A hashtag. A speech from the president on Women’s Day. A commission of inquiry here, a “strategic plan” there. But the drumbeat of violence continues. It seems we are caught between over-familiarity and helplessness. The individual cases blur into statistics. The state says the right things but delivers little. Public outrage spikes and then subsides. The victims themselves become interchangeable, except to those who knew them.
The broken machinery of justice
What is striking about the South African cases is not only the brutality of the crimes but the chronic dysfunction that follows. Delays are standard. Evidence goes missing. Dockets vanish. Postponement is the norm, not the exception. Each week Action Society attends court with grieving families who are expected to show up again and again, to relive the trauma, only to be told to come back in six months. In the meantime, suspects apply for bail, witnesses lose heart, and families gain no closure.
Compare this to the swiftness with which Zarutska’s alleged killer was arrested and charged. Within days the U.S. Justice Department had filed federal charges under a special statute for violence on mass transit. Surveillance footage was released. There is every indication the case will proceed to trial without the delays that we treat as inevitable.
One could argue that America is wealthier, better resourced, more efficient. True enough. But resources alone do not explain the difference. Our courts are not poor by African standards. The deeper problem is cultural: a state apparatus that does not view the timely prosecution of violence against women and children as a matter of urgent priority. Cases involving poor women languish.
The easy answer is to say “more policing” or “harsher sentences.” Politicians love these soundbites. But we already have harsh sentences on the books. The problem is not that our laws are weak. It is that they are not enforced with consistency or speed. Justice delayed is justice denied, and in South Africa justice is almost always delayed.
That is why NGOs like Action Society have become crucial. We monitor cases, pressure prosecutors, oppose bail applications, and, in some instances, hire private investigators. This is extraordinary: in a functioning state, it would be the role of the police and prosecutors to support families, not private entities. Yet without Action Society and many other NGOs, many families would be left in the dark, unable even to track where their case stands.
What is needed is not another “strategic framework” but a relentless focus on competence. Functioning forensic labs. Dockets that don’t vanish. Courts that prioritise serious cases. Prosecutors who communicate with families. And above all, a political culture that recognises the crisis for what it is: not an unfortunate by-product of poverty, but a central test of our constitutional democracy.
So yes, mourn for Iryna Zarutska. But let us not allow the sympathy to remain at arm’s length, as though violence against women were a foreign tragedy. It is our daily reality. Thimna Kuze, Nadia Lotz, Nosiphiwo James: these names should be as present in our national conscience as Zarutska’s is in America’s. Their families deserve more than silence. They deserve justice, and they deserve to know that society has not looked away.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote about the “banality of evil,” the way horror becomes normal when it is repeated often enough. South Africa risks living in that condition permanently: a society where the slaughter of women and children barely registers. To resist that banality requires more than outrage. It requires attention, persistence, and the willingness to demand that our state perform its most basic duty.
When the headlines about Zarutska fade, and they will, the violence here will continue. The question is whether we are prepared to confront it with the seriousness it demands, or whether we will go on consigning our dead to the margins of memory.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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