Please find attached Afrikaans and English soundbite by Ian Cameron MP and isiZulu soundbite by Mzamo Billy MP.
At today’s Portfolio Committee on Police meeting, SAPS confirmed that problems with its crime statistics on women and children are still not resolved.
The committee raised this in June 2025 after SAPS omitted separate figures for women and children murdered, subjected to attempted murder or seriously assaulted. SAPS management told us the figures were in the full report. We checked. They were not. In my letter of 17 June, I asked why the figures were missing and why Parliament had been given an inaccurate answer.
SAPS’s own explanation revealed several faults in the data drawn from police dockets and its Crime Administration System. Adding up the quarterly figures did not produce the annual totals. Some offences had been counted more than once, so that the women-and-children subset could exceed the total number of victims. There were also inconsistencies in recording victims’ ages and sexes and in linking victims to the correct charges. That means SAPS could not reliably say how many women and children fell into these serious crime categories. It withdrew previously published figures and promised corrected data with a detailed explanation. More than 15 months later, SAPS says the problem is still unresolved.
Stats SA’s victim survey, released on 1 September, found that 31.4% of women who experienced assault identified a spouse or intimate partner as the perpetrator. That survey cannot replace accurate police figures showing whether serious violence against women and children is rising or falling.
Nine women’s bodies have been found in Ekurhuleni. Lieutenant General Shadrack Sibiya is before court on serious sexual-offence and trafficking charges, which he is entitled to contest. These matters are separate from the statistics failure, but they underline the need for credible information and effective investigations.
I will ask SAPS for a firm deadline to complete the rectification process. It must identify which figures were wrong or withdrawn, publish the corrected data, and account for the inaccurate information given to Parliament. We have waited long enough.