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About 30% of the women killed in almost 1,200 cases in the past 5 years were shot, data collected from media reports shows. And almost 20% of the women in the female murder cases collected by The Outlier were stabbed to death.
The South Africa Police Service released its official crime statistics in February, which show that 3,880 women were murdered in South Africa in 2023. This is an increase of 24% over 2021’s 3,121 cases reported.
The official SAPS data only tracks the number of women killed. Data collected by The Outlier between 2018 and 2023 from reports in English-language media shows that shooting deaths have significantly risen in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal regions in the past two years. There was a sharp increase in shootings recorded in the Eastern Cape last year, partly because of several mass killings in the province.