The arrest of Ndodana Mkhanyisi Tshuma in South Africa brought an end to an international manhunt that had stretched across borders and captured the attention of Zimbabwean communities in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Zimbabwe, following allegations that he fled Britain shortly after the deaths of his wife and two daughters in a case that has shocked not only the Zimbabwean diaspora but also broader conversations around domestic violence, femicide and the protection of women and children within intimate relationships.
However, while law enforcement authorities in Britain and South Africa were engaged in efforts to locate and apprehend the suspect and while investigators continued the painstaking work of gathering evidence and reconstructing events surrounding the deaths, another process was already unfolding in parallel across social media platforms, blogs, online publications, WhatsApp groups and community discussions, where public opinion had begun forming conclusions that often appeared less interested in questions of accountability and justice than in scrutinising the personal life and private decisions of the deceased woman herself.
In the days that followed the emergence of details surrounding the tragedy, public conversations increasingly drifted away from the central question of how three members of one family allegedly lost their lives and instead became preoccupied with allegations that the deceased wife had been involved in an extra-marital affair, with some online commentators, bloggers and social media users openly or implicitly suggesting that these allegations somehow offered an explanation for the violence or, more troublingly, that they provided a context within which the killings could be better understood.
The result was a striking inversion of the traditional roles of victim and perpetrator, in which the woman who had allegedly lost her life became the subject of public interrogation while the man accused of taking those lives was increasingly portrayed as an individual who had himself suffered betrayal, humiliation or emotional devastation, thereby repositioning him in the public imagination not as an alleged perpetrator of violence but as a casualty of circumstances beyond his control.
Such narratives are neither new nor unique to this case, but rather reflect deeply entrenched societal attitudes towards violence against women that have been documented by gender scholars, media researchers and human rights organisations across the world, all of whom have consistently observed that incidents involving intimate partner violence often trigger a search for explanations rooted in the behaviour of women rather than an examination of the decisions and actions of men who commit violence.
Questions surrounding whether a woman was faithful, respectful, submissive or sufficiently committed to a relationship frequently emerge almost immediately after incidents of femicide become public, whereas questions about entitlement, coercive control, possessiveness and violent constructions of masculinity often receive considerably less attention, even though these factors are recognised internationally as some of the strongest indicators associated with intimate partner homicide.
This tendency to shift attention from perpetrators to victims is not merely a matter of insensitive public commentary but represents a process that gender specialists identify as victim blaming, whereby responsibility for violence is subtly but effectively transferred from the individual who committed the act to the person who suffered its consequences, thereby creating a narrative in which violence becomes an understandable reaction to circumstances rather than a conscious decision for which an individual bears responsibility.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of public discussion surrounding the Tshuma case has been the extent to which allegations of infidelity have come to dominate the narrative despite their complete irrelevance to the moral and legal questions at the centre of the tragedy, because even if such allegations were to be substantiated through evidence presented in court, they would remain incapable of explaining, justifying or mitigating acts of violence against women and children.
International frameworks dealing with violence against women have repeatedly warned against precisely this type of framing, with UN Women, UNESCO and numerous media monitoring organisations cautioning journalists and media practitioners against reproducing narratives that imply that women somehow provoke or contribute to the violence committed against them, since such narratives reinforce harmful stereotypes, undermine accountability and contribute to cultures in which perpetrators are afforded sympathy while victims are subjected to moral scrutiny.
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), widely regarded as the international bill of rights for women, recognises that discriminatory social attitudes and harmful stereotypes play a significant role in perpetuating violence against women, while the African Union’s Maputo Protocol similarly identifies unequal power relations and discriminatory social norms as central drivers of gender-based violence across the continent.
Equally significant in this case is the extent to which allegations of a history of abuse within the relationship have often been overshadowed by discussions surrounding alleged infidelity, despite reports from individuals familiar with the family suggesting that the relationship may have involved previous incidents of physical violence, periods of separation, allegations of sexual violence and interactions with law enforcement authorities, all of which, if substantiated through legal processes, would point towards patterns of behaviour that experts on domestic violence identify as characteristic of coercive and controlling relationships.
Research conducted across multiple jurisdictions has consistently demonstrated that intimate partner homicide rarely occurs as a spontaneous or isolated event but instead represents the culmination of a prolonged pattern of abuse that may include intimidation, surveillance, emotional manipulation, economic control, threats and escalating physical violence, with women often facing their highest levels of risk during periods of separation or when attempting to leave abusive relationships.
For this reason, gender specialists increasingly reject the language of “crime of passion” that has historically dominated media reporting on intimate partner homicide because the phrase implies spontaneity, emotional overwhelm and temporary loss of control, whereas many cases involve patterns of domination and entitlement that unfold over extended periods and ultimately culminate in lethal violence.
The allegations emerging in relation to this case, including reports that travel arrangements had allegedly been made before the deaths were discovered and that efforts may have been undertaken to conceal events from concerned relatives and neighbours, raise important questions that will ultimately need to be addressed through judicial processes rather than through speculation, but they also illustrate why simplistic narratives centred around jealousy or betrayal often obscure more complex realities associated with power, coercion and control.
Perhaps the most painful omission from much of the public conversation has been the relative invisibility of the children themselves, whose lives have too often been reduced to secondary considerations within debates surrounding the conduct of adults, even though their deaths represent an independent tragedy that cannot be explained or contextualised through discussions about marital relationships or allegations of infidelity.
No allegation concerning the behaviour of adults can explain violence against children, and no narrative surrounding betrayal or emotional pain can justify the taking of young lives, yet public discourse has repeatedly returned to questions surrounding the morality of the deceased woman while paying comparatively little attention to the humanity, aspirations and futures that were lost with the deaths of her daughters.
The danger of such narratives extends beyond this individual case because media framing influences public attitudes, policy responses and institutional priorities, meaning that when stories focus excessively on the behaviour of victims rather than on patterns of abuse and failures of protection systems, societies risk reinforcing the very conditions that allow violence against women and children to persist.
As legal proceedings continue following the arrest of Ndodana Mkhanyisi Tshuma in South Africa, and as courts undertake the responsibility of establishing facts through evidence and due process, journalists, bloggers and members of the public alike would do well to remember that the central figures in this story are not rumours, allegations or social media debates but three human beings whose lives came to a violent end and whose memories deserve dignity rather than suspicion, compassion rather than judgement and justice rather than explanation.
