Our Work
How We Work
We use the law as an instrument to realise human rights.
The LRC brings a breadth of experience and a deep knowledge to our work.
Over the last five decades, we have gained valuable experience in using strategic
litigation, legal reform, research, and advocacy to create positive and long-lasting change in the lives of our beneficiaries.
By providing free, expert, and compassionate legal services to individuals, we have provided many ordinary South Africans with the resources to stand up to injustice.
By working with our extensive network of civil society partners and allies, in the service of vulnerable individuals and communities in South Africa and other African nations, we have successfully created legal precedents and won judgments which have made a tangible impact in the lives of millions of people living in South Africa and beyond.
Our areas of focus have included legal reform of corporal punishment in South Africa, access to land, education, and health care, as well as advancing gender and racial equality and the rights of the disabled. We have also worked with partners and communities in other parts of Africa and the global South to support activists facing similar challenges.
In addition to this legacy work, we have identified land and education rights as key drivers of change in South Africa today. Our experienced and diverse team, working across South Africa, have committed themselves to helping landless people to gain access to land and ensure that our children have access to a quality basic education.
Ensuring the provision of scholar transport for qualifying learners in the Eastern Cape
The right to basic education obliges the state to provide learners with scholar transport where access to school would otherwise be hindered by their distance from their school and their family’s inability to pay for transport.
Since the start of the 2024 academic year, thousands of learners across the Eastern Cape Province who qualify for scholar transport were left stranded by the Eastern Cape Departments of Education and Transport. The LRC is currently representing the Khula Community Development Project and three affected schools, Mneketshe Junior Secondary School; SeaView Senior Secondary School; and Toyise Senior Secondary School, to obtain an urgent interdict compelling the ECDOE and ECDOT to process all outstanding scholar transport applications, ensure the immediate provision of scholar transport to learners who qualify for transport under the province’s scholar transport policy, and devise a plan to ensure that a similar failure does not occur at the start of the 2025 academic year.
This application, Khula Community Development Project and Others vs MEC for Education, Eastern Cape and Others, is another case in a series of matters that the LRC has been involved in to try and address shortcomings in the state’s provision of scholar transport.
“Denying scholar transport to learners is a direct violation of their right to education.
To uphold this right, the scholar transport system needs to work effectively, timeously
and be provided to every eligible child to ensure a safe journey to school.”
– Ona Xolo, LRC Attorney
Seeking clarity on land reform and redistribution in South Africa.
The South African Constitution makes provision for the redistribution of land, but there is currently no legislation that guides how land should be allocated for redistribution and, critically, to whom.
In Bezuidenhout and others vs the Minister for Agriculture, the LRC is representing three sheep farmers in the Beaufort West area, who have approached the court to compel the Minister for Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development to issue them with a 30-year lease in terms of the state’s redistribution programme. The applicants, who are the children of farm workers in the Beaufort West area, have been farming there since 2009, after accessing land through the state’s redistribution programme.
In 2019, they applied to the Department for a 30-year lease over the five farms, but to date their lease has not been issued. Despite initially being approved for the lease, the Chief Director: Western Cape Provincial Shared Services, decided in September 2020, not to award the lease to the applicants, after receiving unsubstantiated allegations that the applicants were being used as a “front” by the previous owner of the farms.
While the application seeks to review and set aside the decision not to award the lease to the applicants, they are also seeking systemic relief that will impact the way redistribution programmes are undertaken in South Africa.
To address the lack of a legal framework that currently exists, the applicants are also asking the court for declaratory relief to address the Department’s failure to create a transparent and consistent legal and policy framework for land redistribution in South Africa. The declaratory relief is supported by the East Cape Agricultural Research Project (ECARP), a non-profit organisation situated in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape.
“This declaratory relief will help other people in the same position as the applicants to better understand and navigate the Department’s redistribution programmes and will compel the Department to amend its processes to create a more transparent system.”
– Cecile van Schalkwyk, LRC Attorney
Advancing children’s rights through access to birth registration
In Cirangashane and Others vs the Minister of Home Affairs, the case concerns the right of every child born in South Africa to have their birth registered immediately or as soon as possible after they are born, no matter the status of their parents.
The South African Constitution entrenches the right of every child to a name and nationality from birth, a right which is met through the registration of their birth with the Department of Home Affairs. Without this a child’s Constitutional right to a name is denied, the risk of statelessness increases, and a child’s ability to obtain
education, health care, and social security is compromised. None of this is in the child’s best interests.
Despite the constitutional importance of birth registration, the current legal regime makes birth registration difficult for several reasons.
- The Department failing to implement the existing law to allow the registration of children where one parent is a citizen, permanent resident or refugee, but the other parent does not have a valid, unexpired passport, visa or permit
- The Regulations do not provide for the registration of a child where neither parent is a South African citizen, permanent resident or refugee, and one or both do not have a valid passport, visa or permit
- The Regulations do not provide for the late registration of children if neither parent is a South African citizen, permanent resident or refugee
- The Regulations do not provide for adults who were abandoned or orphaned, and do not have their parents’ documents, and were not registered as children, to register their own births
These exclusions contradict the Constitutional guarantee – supported by international law – that every child’s birth must be registered. It is the State’s obligation to facilitate registration, not to punish children for any mistakes by their parents.
Making early-grade literacy a national priority
The LRC is a co-founder of the Right to Read Campaign (#R2R), which aims to hold government accountable for doing everything practically possible to ensure learners can read for meaning by the age of 10.
The 2023 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results demonstrated that 81% of grade four learners in South Africa cannot read for meaning, in any language. The campaign’s focus is on legislative reform to ensure that the Minister enacts binding reading regulations as part of the right to a basic education. The regulations should clarify, at a minimum, the state’s obligations in relation to teaching time for reading, teacher training for reading, the provision of quality learner and teacher support materials for reading, and regular literacy testing. The potential impact of these regulations is far-reaching.
Importantly, the regulations will be a legal instrument for measuring the performance of the state in relation to reading levels, and to hold them accountable for doing everything practically possible to ensure learners can read for meaning by the age of 10. When implemented, the regulations should dramatically improve the lives of millions of school children.
“Not being able to read for meaning by the age of 10 is a gross violation of a school child’s Constitutional right to a basic education.”
– Cameron McConnachie, LRC Attorney
Why land?
We use strategic litigation, research and law reform to protect communities’ rights to land and natural resources, strengthen accountable governance, and advance food sovereignty and climate justice so people can shape and sustain their own futures.
Our work in this area includes three focus areas:
Environmental and Climate Justice
We support communities to protect their land, livelihoods and ways of life from harmful development, including mining and extractive projects imposed without meaningful participation or consent. Our work recognises that land rights, cultural rights, and environmental protection are deeply connected, especially for communities whose spiritual and economic lives are tied to land and marine resources. Through a climate justice lens, we challenge decisions and policies that shift the costs of environmental harm and climate change onto communities already facing inequality and exclusion.
Food Security and Food Sovereignty
We work with small-scale fishers and farmers to protect their rights to produce, access and control their own food systems. This includes defending access to land, water and marine resources, and challenging laws and policies that threaten sustainable, community-based food production. Our focus is not only on food security, but on food sovereignty — ensuring communities have real power to determine how food is produced, shared and sustained in ways that are locally grounded, equitable and resilient.
Community Access to Land and Resources
We work to secure, protect and enforce communities’ rights to land and natural resources in both rural and urban contexts. This includes advancing equitable land redistribution and restitution, strengthening customary and communal land rights, and ensuring that governance structures such as traditional councils, CPAs, community trusts and municipalities are accountable and lawful. We also challenge unfair laws, practices and failures by the state that undermine people’s land tenure, dignity and ability to shape their own development.
Community Access to Land and Resources
We work to secure, protect and enforce communities’ rights to land and natural resources in both rural and urban contexts. This includes advancing equitable land redistribution and restitution, strengthening customary and communal land rights, and ensuring that governance structures such as traditional councils, CPAs, community trusts and municipalities are accountable and lawful. We also challenge unfair laws, practices and failures by the state that undermine people’s land tenure, dignity and ability to shape their own development.
Environmental and Climate Justice
We support communities to protect their land, livelihoods and ways of life from harmful development, including mining and extractive projects imposed without meaningful participation or consent. Our work recognises that land rights, cultural rights, and environmental protection are deeply connected, especially for communities whose spiritual and economic lives are tied to land and marine resources. Through a climate justice lens, we challenge decisions and policies that shift the costs of environmental harm and climate change onto communities already facing inequality and exclusion.
Food Security and Food Sovereignty
We work with small-scale fishers and farmers to protect their rights to produce, access and control their own food systems. This includes defending access to land, water and marine resources, and challenging laws and policies that threaten sustainable, community-based food production. Our focus is not only on food security, but on food sovereignty — ensuring communities have real power to determine how food is produced, shared and sustained in ways that are locally grounded, equitable and resilient.
Tribal levies case
Challenging unjust tribal levies in South Africa
The LRC represents communities to promote the equality, dignity and freedom of rural South Africans. This work aims to promote the accountability of local governance structures such as traditional councils and communal property associations, while securing the constitutional rights of the members of such communities. In doing so, our work focusses on promoting the recognition and protection of living customary law consistent with the Constitution.
One such case concerned the practice of traditional authorities of imposing levies or taxes on their community members. The practice started under colonial and apartheid times when ‘tribal’ leaders were empowered to levy these taxes on their people. While these taxes were applied arbitrarily, their effect was devastating: community members in arrears were barred from getting proof of address required for identity documents and grants, refused burial rights and even evicted. The practice amounted to a discriminatory ‘double taxation’ of rural people.
In 2015, we represented members of seven traditional communities in Limpopo Province and the Nkuzi Development Trust in challenging the constitutionality of tribal levies. Our clients asked the Court to declare section 25 of the Limpopo Traditional Leadership and Institutions Act 6 of 2005 inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid in as far as it allowed for the levying of taxes, because the Constitution only grants the power to tax to elected government structures.
The Applicants also asked the Court to declare that customary law does not provide for tribal taxes, but only for voluntary contributions from community members following community discussions.
In 2023, the Limpopo High Court found that traditional authorities were not constitutionally entitled to levy taxes and that section 25 of the Limpopo Act was indeed unconstitutional. The Court confirmed that customary law does not allow for compulsory and unilateral levies to be charged. The order required the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs to present a plan, to be approved by the Court, of how they will ensure that the order is communicated to communities to ensure that the practice is stopped. On 20 December 2025, the Constitutional Court confirmed that invalidity of s25 of the Limpopo Act, finding that traditional leaders and councils are not democratically elected legislative bodies and therefore cannot impose taxes under the Constitution. Neither can they impose taxes under customary law.
While the case was brought in Limpopo as the Limpopo Act was the only statute that allowed for levies, the finding about customary law and the constitutionality of these levies and taxes apply across the country.
The LRC continues to pursue the implementation of these orders.
Gwatyu
Defending Informal Land Rights
Because of our colonial and apartheid past, the majority of South Africans continue to hold land and occupy dwellings outside the formal property system. This includes people on communal land, farm workers and dwellers, people in informal settlements and backyard shacks, inner city buildings, and RDP houses with either no title or outdated titles. While legislation like the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act, the Extension of Securities of Tenure Act and the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act provide protection against arbitrary displacement, they don’t tell people what they are entitled to do with and on their land – and often remain invisible to the State.
At its core, the Gwatyucase concerns the constitutional promise, in section 25(6), of security of tenure. It asks how people who have known only one piece of land as home, and who have occupied and worked that land for generations, but who were denied recognition of their land rights by a racist regime, can assert their land rights today. Can the state leave them in limbo?
Angelina Matsheke was born on Maties farm in the Gwatyu area in 1970 Her father was born on the same farm in 1930, the son of a farmworker. During his lifetime, the farms first belonged to white farmers for whom he and his parents worked, before being expropriated by the apartheid government in the 1970s to be incorporated in the Transkei. The white farmers left, but the farmworkers, including Angelina’s parents, stayed and worked the land. Between 1976 and 1990, Prime Minister Matanzima of the Transkei handed some of the farms over to well-connected lessees. Still, Angelina’s family and many like hers, stayed. With the advent of democracy, the land was transferred to the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development, who still holds it today.
The farm dwellers are today protected as beneficial occupiers in terms of the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act31 of 1996 (IPILRA). While this protection has kept the State from arbitrarily evicting them, they have otherwise struggled to gain recognition as the holders of land rights similar to ownership rights over the Gwatyu area.
The situation is complicated by an unsuccessful land claim over the land by the neighbouring Amatshatshu traditional council. They were removed from the area when white farmers moved in in the 1870s – before the 1913 cut off date for restitution. Since their claim failed, they have continued to pursue it politically.
Faced with ongoing uncertainty and hostility from the State, Angeline and the other households occupying two of the Gwatyu farms, approached the High Court in Makhanda asking the Court to confirm that they hold informal rights to land under IPILRA. More importantly, they ask for an order that confirms what those rights mean: to possess, use, and enjoy the land as if they were owners, subject to communal rules. They also ask the Court to direct that their informal land rights be registered against the State’s title deeds. As real rights, they can and should be recorded, strengthening tenure security and preventing future disputes.
If successful, the Applicants will be the first of the millions of informal land rights holders in South Africa who are able to have their rights defined and recorded, giving them the tenure security that the Constitution promised.
Bezuidenhout
Farmers demand fair land process
When Johannes Bezuidenhout, Herold Bezuidenhout, and Jan Bergh were told in 2009 that they would be allocated farmland in the Beaufort West area through the state’s redistribution programme, it was a dream come true for the three men. As the children of farm workers from the area, this opportunity not only gave them a chance to realise their passion for farming, but it also redressed discriminatory patterns of access to land, which under the apartheid regime, saw only white farmers owning land in the area. Their sheep farming operations became highly successful, and in 2020 as well as 2023, their wool obtained the highest average price for the Beaufort West region at the national wool auction in Gqeberha.
However, like thousands of other potential land reform beneficiaries, they were faced with an opaque, unaccountable and inequitable system. While section 25(5) of the Constitution makes provision for the redistribution of land, there has never been legislation that clearly sets out how the Department should do this. Instead, successive land redistribution policies have been published by the Department to guide the programme, but these policies lack clear application and allocation procedures, require no communication of decisions or reasons, and do not provide the applicants for state land with any recourse should their applications be unsuccessful. In addition, the policies were often not published, making it difficult for potential beneficiaries to know what will be considered when they apply, and enabling decision makers to shift their reasoning as they pleased. In an expert affidavit to the Court, Prof Ruth Hall of PLAAS said that their extensive research of the redistribution programme showed that “the selection of people and allocation of land to them is not transparent. We also found that decisions taken are frequently changed afterwards, with beneficiaries being told they must leave the land allocated to them, or share it with other people, or cease their own farming to make way for companies contracted by government as ‘strategic partners’ to manage ‘their’ farms for them”. Land leases, they found, were “chaotic”.
The three farmers filed an application in the Western Cape High Court to review and set aside a decision by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (as it then was) to not award a 30-year lease to their farming entity over five farms in the Beaufort West District, collectively known as Plateau Farms.
In December 2019, the Department placed an advertisement in the newspaper, calling for applicants for a 30-year lease over Plateau Farm. Through Nuveld, the applicants applied for the lease, underwent an interview process, and was recommended by both the Provincial and National Land Acquisition and Allocation Control Committees as the preferred candidates for the lease. Despite this recommendation, the Acting Chief Director at the time took a decision on 27 September 2020, not to award the lease to Nuveld. This was never communicated to the applicants. The three farmers say the decision was unreasonable, irrational and procedurally unfair.
They are also asking the court for declaratory relief to address the Department’s failure to create a transparent, accountable, fair and consistent legal and policy framework for land redistribution in South Africa. The relief, supported by the East Cape Agricultural Research Project, is for an order that any applicant that applies for a state land lease has a right to administrative action that is lawful, reasonable, and procedurally fair.
Why education?
The realisation of the right to basic education, as laid out in the South African Constitution, stands to benefit generations of South African children, and alter the trajectory of the future of the country.
Our work in this programme includes:
We have worked with government to draft regulations and develop policy, and engaged with public servants to improve mechanisms for faster delivery of educational materials, furniture, transport and infrastructure.
We have successfully litigated in an attempt to overcome resource and administrative obstructions in the provision of quality education.
We have advocated for legislative reform and changes to education policy.
We have advocated for legislative reform and changes to education policy.
We have worked with government to draft regulations and develop policy, and engaged with public servants to improve mechanisms for faster delivery of educational materials, furniture, transport and infrastructure.
We have successfully litigated in an attempt to overcome resource and administrative obstructions in the provision of quality education.
Education case study: The Madzodzo case
The Madzodzo case: helping to protect children’s right to a basic education
How we worked with parents, partners, and public officials to get 600 000 desks into schools in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
A 2011 government audit found that 1,300 of the Eastern Cape province’s 5,700 state schools lacked adequate furniture, affecting over 605,000 children.
“Many children were sitting on the floor, standing, or squeezing into desks shared with others, making basic reading and writing tasks virtually impossible,” explains attorney Cameron McConnachie, head of the LRC Education Programme.
In Madzodzo vs the Department of Basic Education (2014), the LRC took the South African Department of Education to court in three rounds of litigation, with the end result that the South African High Court declared the government’s failure to address the problem of a lack of desks and chairs in schools a violation of the Constitutional right to a basic education.
The High Court also ordered the government to deliver sufficient desks and chairs to all Eastern Cape schools by 31 May 2014.
“This case is significant because in the judgment the High Court affirmed the right to basic education, as distinct from other socio-economic rights in the South African Constitution, as ‘immediately realisable’. The judgment also stressed that the right to a basic education ‘requires the provision of a range of educational resources’, including desks and chairs, and is not merely a right to a place in a school. Lastly, the judgment set an important precedent by compelling the government accountable for the delivery of its constitutional obligation.”
The Beaumont Primary School Case
Advancing equality for transgender learners in schools
At the end of 2023, the LRC launched the WM obo OM and Another v the School Governing Body of Beaumont Primary matter in the Equality Court. The applicants in this matter are the parents of a transgender boy (OM) who attended Beaumont Primary School in Somerset West, Cape Town. In 2022 OM enrolled in Grade 1 at the school. OM had begun his transition prior to his enrolment. Therefore, his parents had engaged with the principal prior to his enrolment in relation to accommodating OM’s use the boys’ bathroom and his wearing the boys’ swimming uniform. The principal accommodated OM who did not encounter any issues at the school.With the arrival of the new principal, however, OM has faced multiple forms of discrimination based on his gender identity. He was no longer permitted to use his preferred bathroom and preferred swimming uniform. The school environment was no longer safe for OM, and he has since left the school. Nonetheless, his parents have decided to continue pursuing the case so that no other learner experiences the same exclusion, discrimination, and harassment.
Beyond the relief sought for the applicants, the broader relief is aimed at directing the Western Cape Education Department and the Department of Basic Education to promulgate regulations to ensure that transgender and gender-diverse learners can use the bathrooms and wear the hairstyles and school and sports uniforms that correspond with their gender identity. The LRC believes that this case has the potential to be groundbreaking in establishing the foundation for an inclusive schooling environment for transgender and gender diverse-learners.
On 26 May 2025 there was a hearing about preliminary issues regarding whether the court can make the determination of whether discrimination occurred or not given that OM has left the school and the country. We are still waiting for the court’s judgment on these preliminary issues.
Why legacy?
Our legacy work includes protecting and defending civil, political and socio-economic rights.
Our work in this area includes:
Openness and accountability
Access to justice and civil society support
Refugees, asylum seekers & migrant protections
Equality & non-discrimination
Equality & non-discrimination
Openness and accountability
Refugees, asylum seekers & migrant protections
Access to justice and civil society support
Legacy case study: Silicosis class action
South Africa’s largest class action case sees justice for those suffering from silicosis and TB
R320 million paid to 3 598 claimants in historicsilicosis class action case.
In 2013 a class action case was launched by the Legal Resources Centre in partnership with Abrahams Kiewitz Attorneys and Richard Spoor Attorneys (claimants attorneys) on behalf of mineworkers suffering from silicosis, a disease affecting the lungs.
The hearing of the silicosis class certification application was held from 12-23 October 2015 at the High Court in Johannesburg. Judgment in the certification application was delivered by the full bench on 13 May 2016, which set the scene for the largest class action in South Africa’s history.
The mining companies applied for leave to appeal in the Supreme Court of Appeal. The appeal was going to be heard in March 2018; however, prior to and after the May 2016 court hearing, various meetings were held between all the legal representatives to pursue the possibility of a settlement. This resulted in a settlement with six mining companies, which withdrew their appeals when the settlement agreement became final, with the high court approving the settlement as fair, adequate and in the interests of the class members.
In November 2019, the settlement resulted in the creation of the Tshiamiso Trust to facilitate payments to any employees who – between 12 March 1965
and 10 December 2019 – worked at any of the 82 gold mines listed in the settlement agreement and who had contracted silicosis or TB due to their work. These employees are potentially eligible for compensation.
On 7 April 2022, after one year of the Trust’s claims management system being in place, the Tshiamiso Trust stated that it had paid out claims amounting to more than R320 million to over 3 598 eligible claimants.
“We welcome this progress on behalf of the thousands of people who suffer from silicosis and TB due to their work and we renew our commitment to all potential silicosis claimants, says Sipesihle Mguga, LRC Attorney.
The remaining appeal
Only two mining companies – DRDGold Limited and ERPM – have appealed the class certification judgment after the settlement order. While the appeal
is moving forward, many silicosis claimants will have already lost their lives to their ailments. Should the appeal be dismissed, the LRC will need to decide
whether to continue with the trial on behalf of the class representatives who worked for these mining companies.This will take many years, and further silicosis claimants may pass away. Therefore, the greater importance remains in the argument for transmissibility of general damages so that the family members left behind will have a claim in the event that the subsequent trial is successful. The LRC has chosen to oppose the appeal and will argue an important aspect raised during the certification application: the development of the common law on transmissibility of general damages.
Why gender-based violence?
We use strategic litigation and law reform to strengthen protection for survivors, improve accountability where the law is poorly implemented, and ensure the justice system properly recognises the realities of abuse, including in cases involving self defence.
Our work in this area includes:
Battered Woman Syndrome
Sexual Corruption
Sexual Corruption
Our goal is to secure legal recognition of sexual corruption as corruption, or as a standalone offence, and to drive accountability by supporting better investigation and prosecution practices that protect survivors rather than treating them as complicit.
Battered Woman Syndrome
Our goal is to ensure courts properly recognise the realities of prolonged abuse by integrating battered woman syndrome and related expert evidence into how cases are decided and sentenced, so guilt, self defence and culpability are assessed with full context and fairness.
Sexual Corruption
Sexual corruption or sextortion is the exchange of entrusted public or institutional power for sexual favours.
Across South Africa, too many women and young people are forced into an impossible choice: submit to sexual demands or lose access to something they need. A job. A bursary. Housing. Water. A permit. This abuse of power, known as sexual corruption, is not simply misconduct. It is the exchange of entrusted public or institutional power for sexual favours. And it is happening in spaces where people are already vulnerable. It happens where NEED meets POWER.
As part of our gender-based violence work, the Legal Resources Centre has become increasingly concerned about the prevalence of sexual corruption. Research and community-based evidence show that young women between the ages of 18 and 24 are most at risk, followed closely by women aged 25 and 34. These are women trying to study, work, build families and survive in a difficult economy. Instead, many are confronted with gatekeepers who demand sex in exchange for access to basic opportunities and services.
Despite its widespread occurrence, sexual corruption is not explicitly criminalised under the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act(PRECCA). This legal gap has serious consequences. Survivors may struggle to have their cases properly investigated or prosecuted. In some instances, they even face the risk of being treated as complicit rather than as victims of coercion. Silence, fear of retaliation, stigma and uncertainty in the law continue to shield perpetrators and deepen harm. We believe this must change.
Our work focuses on advancing the recognition of sexual corruption as a form of corruption, or as a standalone offence, under PRECCA. We are raising awareness through public engagements, research and dialogue so that communities understand what sexual corruption is and why it matters. Naming the harm is the first step toward ending it.
We are also engaging with the Sexual Offences and Community Affairs Unit within the National Prosecuting Authority in structured dialogue to address the practical challenges and opportunities in prosecuting sexual corruption. This includes examining how existing corruption and sexual offences frameworks are being used, where they fall short and what reform may be required to ensure accountability without prosecuting the survivors. By working toward legal recognition, accountability and institutional reform, we aim to ensure that survivors are protected, perpetrators are held accountable, and public power is exercised lawfully and ethically.
“At its core, this is a human rights issue. Sexual corruption violates dignity, equality and bodily autonomy. It exploits economic vulnerability and entrenches gender inequality. No one should have to trade their body for access to education, employment or basic services.”
– Sipesihle Mguga, GBV Programme Co-Lead
Women Who Kill Their Abuser
Women who kill or battered women syndrome refers to women who kill an intimate partner who has subjected them to prolonged abuse, often in circumstances shaped by trauma, fear, coercive control, and the failure of support systems to provide effective protection.
A concerning trend has emerged in South Africa: women who experience prolonged domestic abuse, and who have not been effectively protected by the system, sometimes kill their abusers as a last resort. When they are prosecuted, the history of abuse and institutional failure is too often sidelined in the assessment of guilt and sentence. In doing so, the legal system risks compounding that abuse rather than delivering justice.
Our work focuses on changing that. We want to advocate for the proper recognition and integration of Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) as a critical factor in the adjudication of cases involving women who kill their abusers. This is not about creating a “special defence” or placing anyone above the law. It is about ensuring that courts fully understand the psychological, social and coercive realities of prolonged abuse when assessing intention, imminence, reasonableness and culpability.
In many of the cases we have encountered, the pattern is disturbingly similar. A woman reports repeated physical violence, threats, economic control and isolation. She may have sought help from family, community members, or even law enforcement often without meaningful protection. The abuse escalates. Eventually, in a moment shaped by fear, trauma, and a belief that there is no safe exit, she kills her abuser. When the matter reaches court, the focus narrows to the final act. The years of terror that preceded it fade into the background. This approach is legally and morally insufficient.
Battered Woman Syndrome, properly understood, assists courts in contextualizing a survivor’s state of mind. It explains why leaving is not always a realistic option, why danger is not confined to a single explosive moment, and why a threat can be perceived as imminent even if it does not fill neatly within traditional formulations of private defence. Without this context, courts risk applying legal tests in a vacuum, detached from the lived realities of gender-based violence.
Our aim is to develop jurisprudence that requires judicial officers to meaningfully engage with the history of abuse when adjudicating these matters. That includes the admission and careful consideration of expert evidence, a nuanced understanding of coercive control, and sentencing approaches that reflect diminished moral blameworthiness where prolonged abuse is proved.
At its core, this work is about fairness. The law must be capable of recognizing the difference between calculated violence and survival shaped by years of harm. A justice system committed to dignity, equality and substantive fairness cannot ignore the context in which these tragedies occur.