Gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide have dominated headlines across Africa for several years, and the pattern has only intensified. As Kenyans gathered on June 1, 2026, to mark the country's Independence Day, others were in the streets demanding action against femicide, echoing protests in  South Africa at the end of 2025 doing the same. Most recently, Ethiopians launched a nationwide campaign called 'Tisema' ("let her be heard"), which drew widespread attention in August 2026 as a public outcry against femicide. This issue is seen within the statistics as well: nearly 1 in 5 partnered women in South Africa report experiencing physical violence, and in Kenya, 38 per cent of women have experienced physical violence, while 85 per cent have witnessed violence against other women. This blog intends to explore violence from a different sphere, looking into how moral panic around false assault allegations impacts violence against women in Africa. 

The phenomenon of false assault allegations is often positioned in public discourse as a tool wielded by vindictive women to punish men or extort their resources.  However, several data sources from over 20 years of studies included in a World Metric report found that only 2-10% of rape allegations are falsified. Significantly, the study found that within that, a large portion were made by other men, often police officers trying to nail down a suspect, emphasising that false allegations are the exception, not the rule. This detail matters: even in the rare case where an allegation is fabricated, it is frequently the state’s own enforcement apparatus, rather than the alleged victim, that manufactures the falsehood in pursuit of an unrelated institutional goal. That reframes the familiar story of the “lying woman” as, more accurately, a story about how criminal justice systems sometimes cut corners. Although this specific study was conducted in the UK, the pattern of exaggerated moral panic travels well beyond its borders, while the barriers to reporting travel even further. Data indicate that African women are even less likely to report because of barriers such as social stigma and lack of justice systems, layered on top of economic dependence on the accused. Therefore, in the context of African women, they are the least likely to fabricate a claim, because the cost of coming forward is already so high. 

Linking these findings to the broader prevalence of GBV reveals a mechanism operating on two levels. On the social sphere, the significant exaggeration of false allegations reduces accountability by creating a convenient scapegoat: it lets communities lean on generalised mistrust of women rather than scrutinise the accused. This signals to perpetrators that violence against women carries limited social consequence, which in turn discourages survivors from reporting for fear of being disbelieved or blamed. On the institutional sphere, this same narrative hands law enforcement a ready-made justification to dismiss reports of gender-based violence outright, or to pursue them selectively for personal or professional benefit, such as closing a high-profile case, rather than protecting the survivor in front of them. This is not merely theoretical: reporting on Kenya’s femicide task force found that in most documented cases, victims had already reported abuse, disclosed their fears, or sought help from family, police, or community leaders, but were ignored or redirected to informal dispute-resolution processes instead of being protected. That pattern illustrates the institutional failure directly: women did engage the system, and the system declined to engage back. This also raises the practical barrier to reporting and can leave women stranded in abusive dynamics for lack of a credible state alternative. The lack of infrastructure and social support for women facing gender-based violence is therefore best understood as a compounding failure, a social failure that legitimises disbelief, and an institutional failure that operationalises it. 

These costs can also be represented using the utility possibility frontier seen in Figure 1 below, borrowed from the cooperative bargaining models of economists Manser and Brown (1980) and McElroy and Horney (1981). Developed to analyse intra-household decision-making, this framework treats a partnership is treated as a negotiation between two people with distinct preferences, and each party’s threat point is defined as the utility they could secure if the negotiation broke down entirely, that is, their best alternative outside the relationship. In a society marked by state and social mistrust towards women, a woman’s threat point sits close to the origin: her utility outside the relationship is small because the alternatives that would normally raise it are unreliable or absent. Some potential externalities of this theory are that shelters for GBV survivors may be under-funded or oversubscribed, peer and family support may be undermined by the same “she’s probably lying” narrative discussed above, and state-sanctioned financial compensation or enforcement against the perpetrator is unlikely to materialise if her report is unlikely to be believed or acted on in the first place. With a threat point this weak, remaining in the relationship becomes the utility-maximising choice even when the relationship is abusive, illustrated by the threat points meeting inside, rather than on, the curve.