Gender-based violence, institutional response, and policy reform in Southern Africa: Legal frameworks, access to justice, and survivor-centred approaches in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia

Background: Gender-based violence remains a critical public health, human rights, and governance challenge across Southern Africa, with the region recording some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence, femicide, and sexual violence in the world. Despite significant legislative reform over the past two decades, institutional responses — encompassing policing, prosecution, judicial process, and survivor support services — remain inadequate, inconsistent, and frequently re-traumatising for survivors who engage formal justice systems.

Aim: This study examined how legal frameworks, institutional responses, and survivor-centred policy approaches address gender-based violence in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, assessing the alignment between legislative provisions and the experiences of survivors accessing formal justice systems.

Methodology: A mixed qualitative methodology combined comparative legal analysis of gender-based violence legislation across the three countries, analysis of criminal justice system administrative data, and in-depth interviews with 54 survivors, 18 social workers, and 12 gender-based violence policy practitioners. Data were collected between March and November 2025 and analysed using critical feminist thematic analysis.

Findings: All three countries have enacted significant gender-based violence legislative reforms, but institutional implementation is systematically constrained by resource deficits, inadequate police training, prosecutorial attrition, and fragmented survivor support services. South Africa's Domestic Violence Amendment Act 2021 represents the most advanced legislative framework, but high case attrition rates and secondary victimisation by police remain persistent barriers. Zimbabwe and Zambia face more severe resource constraints that limit implementation of comparatively less comprehensive legal frameworks.

Contributions: The study contributes to gender studies, criminology, and public policy literature by providing comparative empirical evidence of the implementation gap between GBV legislative ambition and institutional reality across three Southern African contexts, and by centring survivor experiences as the primary measure of institutional effectiveness