In recent Movember gatherings, a sentiment echoed in separate circles: the increasingly common refrain, especially on social media, that “Men are trash.”
This phrase reflects collective frustration, yet it also creates an image: men as hollowed-out containers, stripped of value, discarded to rot on society’s margins.
This conversation intensifies in light of President Ramaphosa’s second declaration — at the G20 summit in November 2025 — that Gender Based Violence is a national crisis.
The first declaration in 2019 led to a state-of-crisis framework, yet six years later the statistics have worsened, not improved.
A Nation Under Systemic Pressure
Over the past six years, South Africa has faced declining GDP and rising inflation, worsening service-delivery failures, entrenched corruption and police capture and escalating unemployment.
These forces shape the emotional landscape in which South Africans live. For the poor, a single rand added to bread is significant; meanwhile, ostentatious displays of wealth create a cycle of emotional violence.
Men — regardless of whether they commit harm — absorb these pressures and often suppress the emotions they cannot safely express.
The Numbers and What They Reveal
SAPS recorded crimes against women rising from 202,633 (2023/24) to 203,692 (2024/25).
The HSRC reports that 33.1% of women have experienced physical violence in their lifetime — implying that 33.1% of men have perpetrated it.
These numbers tell us something uncomfortable: GBV is not the behaviour of a monstrous minority; it is interwoven with the psychic life of a significant portion of the population.
Where Is the Inner Life of the Perpetrator?
Society focuses — correctly — on supporting victims.
But this leaves the perpetrator in the shadows: unnamed, unspoken, unexamined.
Yet every perpetrator was once a baby boy whose first instinct was to seek his mother’s love. Every man who harms is still someone who dreams, fears, and carries a psyche shaped by suffering.
If we cannot see the humanity of the perpetrator, we cannot understand the origin of the violence.
President Ramaphosa said in his crisis declaration, “The violence perpetrated by men against women erodes the social fabric of nations.”
True — but also burdening. It places collective guilt on all men, including the non-violent, while saying little about why men become violent or how transformation might occur.
He also called for men and boys to challenge harmful norms, and while that gestures in the right direction, it remains vague. What are these norms? How do men transcend them while living inside systems that offer them no lived experience of justice?
A Mythic and Depth-Psychological Reading of Violence
Archetypal psychology treats violence as a collision of energies — masculine and feminine — whose destructive meeting is ancient, mythic, and often a precursor to transformation.
In myth, violence is never only an act. It is a stage in a larger psychic drama.
From a Gestalt perspective, violence often signals an unbearable suffering the person cannot face directly.
The more extreme the act, the deeper the avoided pain.
James Hillman’s concept of reflection — a bending inward between compulsion and inhibition — offers a direction: men must be helped to enter the inner space where violence can be transmuted rather than enacted.
Why Policy Cannot Transform the Psyche
Government declarations, strategies, and institutional frameworks cannot touch the level where violence originates. They aim at behaviour, not the inner images, wounds, and energies that precede behaviour. They aim at the symptom – not the cause.
Thus, after six years of crisis management, the crisis worsens.
A Model for Transformation: Mindfulness, Community, and Initiatory Practice
Mircea Eliade wrote that yoga seeks liberation from conditioning — from the forces that bind the individual to time, body, and social structure.
The social conditions in which yoga developed were not unlike ours: turbulent, unjust, and spiritually disoriented.
Today, mindfulness offers a modern analogy.
Practices from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ellen Langer, and related practitioners strengthen presence, emotional regulation, discernment, and the capacity to remain open-hearted in the midst of strong emotion.
But mindfulness alone is not enough.
Transformation requires community — men in facilitated spaces where they can express vulnerability without ridicule, confront their shadows without shame, and experience containment for emotions that might otherwise erupt as harm.
Depth psychologists like Amy and Arnold Mindell have shown how group process work can create such containers for these necessary initiations into inner depths.
Building a Grass-Roots Movement of Men
The solution to GBV will not emerge from governmental policy or public messaging alone.
It will emerge from men working with men learning emotional literacy, practising presence, naming experienced suffering, reimagining masculine identity, and creating initiatory containers for transformation.
The work must be local, community-driven, and self-sustaining.
Supporting survivors is essential.
But unless we also address the inner lives of men — especially those susceptible to enacting violence — we will remain trapped in the same cycle.
South Africa needs a transformation of masculinity from the inside out.
Only men, in community with and supporting each other towards a healthier masculinity, can create this.
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