by: Tracy Ngwena | TEARS Foundation
These are guest articles written by AMC Cohort 9 (2025). They form part of a sector exercise, where cohort members engage with industry issues, perspectives, and solutions through thought leadership writing.
Every day, the phones at TEARS Foundation’s Hope Centre light up with calls, WhatsApp messages, and USSD requests. Behind each message is a quiet question: “Can someone help me?” And the answer never changes: “We want to help. We see you. This was not your fault.” For over a decade, TEARS Foundation has stood at the intersection of compassion and crisis offering immediate help, trauma-informed counselling, and hope to survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). But the weight of this work raises a harder truth: why is civil society still carrying so much of the state’s duty to protect? The everyday reality of holding the line.
A day at TEARS begins with urgency. Responders field calls from women fleeing violent partners, parents reporting abuse, and colleagues trying to help a co-worker in distress. Each voice is different, but the pattern is painfully familiar fear, confusion, and, often, disbelief from those meant to help. South Africa’s GBV crisis is staggering. In 2023/24, police recorded 42,569 rapes and over 7,000 sexual assaults. Behind those numbers are people whose safety depends on the first response they receive. Yet too often, survivors meet silence, secondary trauma, or bureaucratic delay. TEARS supported more than 41,000 cases in just six months in 2025 a number that signals not only need but neglect. For every call TEARS answers, there’s an unanswered one elsewhere. This is not capacity failure; it’s systemic abdication.
Where is the State?
The Constitution promises equality, dignity, and protection. But on the ground, GBV response remains patchy, underfunded, and inconsistent. Police officers rotate without training in trauma-informed care. Health workers lack protocols for survivors who arrive after the assault. Shelters operate on shoestring budgets, relying on donor goodwill and volunteer time. Civil society is not just “filling the gaps” it’s propping up a system that should stand on its own.
When NGOs like TEARS carry the frontline burden, the state becomes a silent partner present in policy but absent in presence. The missing state is not just a funding issue; it’s a failure of imagination and will. Until the state sees survivor care as a core service, not a charitable add-on, South Africa will continue outsourcing its duty of care to exhausted responders.
TEARS’ Response: Building Capacity in the Void
TEARS Foundation is doing what the state should have done long ago: building competence into the system. Through its currently under construction First Responder Training Academy, TEARS is hoping to create a national knowledge hub to teach trauma- informed response across workplaces, schools, and institutions. The Academy’s model is practical and replicable teaching active listening, safe referral, documentation, and responder self-care. It is less about charity and more about infrastructure: ensuring that wherever a survivor turns, someone knows what to do.
As TEARS notes in its own reporting, “In the absence of a benchmark, we are defining our own standard one that is innovative, efficient, and deeply survivor-centred.” That line, both proud and sobering, captures the paradox of civil society in South Africa today: building systems because the state won’t. TEARS’ advocacy campaign, Bang Your Pot®, reminds South Africans that the fight against GBV begins at home literally. The act of banging pots, drawn from protest tradition, transforms domestic objects into symbols of collective refusal. But even this creative activism carries an edge: people are making noise because they are not being heard.
Across social media, schools, and workplaces, Bang Your Pot® has doubled engagement in the past year. Awareness is growing. What’s missing is the state’s echo real investment in the responders, counsellors, and shelters who already hold the line.
Imagining a Different Future
What would a true partnership look like? A South Africa where the state funds and supports community-led responders, where police and hospitals meet survivors with care and coordination, and where trauma- informed practice is standard, not exceptional. Until then, the burden will continue to fall on those who care the most.
TEARS Foundation’s Training Academy is a blueprint for shared responsibility, not a replacement for it. Because compassion can carry us far but only policy, resources, and political will can carry us all the way.
The Call
The frontline is full. We cannot keep expecting those who care the most to carry the most. It’s time the state stepped up not just in words or policies, but in presence. Until that day, TEARS Foundation and others like it will keep holding the line with courage, compassion, and the quiet conviction that every survivor deserves a system that works.
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