The Constitution promises her and all South Africans freedom from violence. Twelve years and one dissertation later, law graduate Kaylah Poonsamy is still waiting and still arguing.
Beep. Every. Four. Minutes. Through music, through ads, through the news. Listening to the radio at home or in the car took on a new meaning. Kaylah Poonsamy was 12 years old the first time she understood what that sound meant.
In the corners of her home and favourite local creative spaces, Kaylah paints, sketches, cooks, bakes and writes – and not too long ago, when her lecturer told her to write about what keeps her up at night, she didn’t hesitate.
Her final year law dissertation argued that South Africa’s constitution, celebrated as one of the most progressive in the world, is exactly that. Celebrated.
“On-paper-oaths,” she calls it. Empty promises dressed in legalese.
The government’s 2019 Emergency Response Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide set 80 targets to be achieved over six months. In its April 2021 review of the plan’s implementation, the Commission for Gender Equality found that only 17 had been fully achieved. Twelve were partially achieved, while 51 had not been achieved at all.
Kaylah describes the implementation figures as meagre for a plan intended for national rollout: 2238 SAPS officers trained in proactive GBV interventions, two shelters established and 11 Sexual Offences Courts set up.
This is where the contradiction becomes measurable. South Africa has never been short of plans. The problem is what happens after they leave the page.
In her dissertation, which was formed across lecture halls at the University of Pretoria and at her desk in her room at home, Kaylah describes GBV as “a characteristic inseparable from South Africa’s identity.”
Her own identity was still forming the first time she heard the beep.
It was a rape awareness campaign run on a popular local radio station, 947, alongside LEAD SA. A beep at four-minute intervals to indicate when someone was raped in the country, woven between familiar songs and news stories. A sound that cemented her perspective on GBV and a sobering account of the brutality faced by South African women.
A little more than a decade on, the beep that was meant to spark change “has grown into a fire,” she says.
Parts of her dissertation were written in 2024, while she was in physical recovery. Fresh out of the hospital due to health issues, with the hospital’s clinical scent still
lingering behind her, she gave her mind no recovery at all. She called it “self-inflicted torture” and kept writing.
She knew that an argument had to be made.
Feminist jurisprudence, the legal field that examines how the law treats and fails women, is not crowded territory in South Africa. “Strip the legalese,” she argues, because once you do, you can see why it has to exist.
The Constitution she was taught to celebrate begins to look like the country’s most beautiful piece of fiction. Freedom from all forms of violence, public and private? Yes, Section 12 guarantees it. Equality? We read it in Section 9. And yet, a 2023 national study of nearly 4000 rape cases found that fewer than one in 10 resulted in conviction. The distance between the right and the reality remains measurable.
And at its most fatal, that distance widens further. A 2024 South African Medical Research Council national femicide study found that 60% of women murdered in 2020/21 were killed by an intimate partner. Fewer than one in five intimate-partner femicide cases resulted in conviction.
“It’s a vow for a utopia that the government doesn’t plan to make good on,” Kaylah says.
With the Constitution in one hand and statistics in the other, there is a cognitive dissonance. A country celebrated for its progress, with no signs of progress where it really matters most.
But the failure she describes isn’t confined to Parliament, police stations or courtrooms.
A 2023 Afrobarometer survey found that 43% of South Africans thought a woman reporting rape, domestic violence or other GBV was likely to be criticised, harassed or shamed by others in her community. Eighteen percent regarded domestic violence as a private family matter rather than a criminal one.
Which perhaps explains why Kaylah is the kind of progressive that the Constitution claims to be.
She co-hosts an intersectional feminist podcast, Tuition for Revolution with T and Kake and has become, in her words, “the annoying cousin at family gatherings.” The one who won’t laugh at the dark joke, who creates a necessary stir at the dinner table. Because a passing comment isn’t always something that you should just move past.
If the failure of the law is also a failure of culture? If the Constitution is a vow the state won’t keep? Kaylah will keep saying so in the rooms she finds herself in. Ordinary conversation matters in the effort to dismantle attitudes that allow violence to persist.
Will there be a noticeable change?
Her optimism won’t arrive on time. But her hope will. In small amounts, though.
Skepticism, however, threatens to overwhelm her quiet hope. Driven by what many South Africans see as the circus of the country’s political landscape, priorities of the Government of National Unity (GNU) lie elsewhere, mostly in service delivery.
But the problem, she argues, is deeper than any one administration.
“Change lies more in the re-shaping of societal attitudes,” she says, distinctly.
That belief is also why her activism rarely looks like legal work. She co-hosts a podcast in an effort to make feminist and legal ideas accessible beyond academia. She challenges jokes. She questions comments. She signs petitions, supports protests and pays attention to legislation concerning women’s rights.
The beep still follows her into a podcast studio, dinner tables and the dissertation she chose to write. None of it is in parliament or the courtrooms.
But isn’t that the point?
The law has to come from somewhere else entirely. A constitutional right cannot remain a sentence in a statute book. It has to survive the police station, the family gathering, and the ordinary attitudes that determine whether a woman is believed.
For Kaylah, making the law tangible may begin there: one conversation at a time.
