Professor Rachel Jewkes, one of the world’s top researchers into gender based violence, at her office at the SAMRC in Pretoria. (Photo: Elri Voigt/Spotlight)News & Features
27th August 2025 | Elri Voigt
From anti-apartheid activist to top rated researcher, Professor Rachel Jewkes has spent her career trying to make the world a better place for women. Spotlight spoke to her about her journey to South Africa from the United Kingdom and how she became one of the country’s leading researchers on gender-based violence.
Professor Rachel Jewkes’ colourful office on the first floor of the Gauteng branch of the South African Medical Research Unit (SAMRC) pays homage to the three main roles she has had over the years, activist, researcher, and as the coffee cup next to her proclaims: “badass mother”.
Traces of her daughter Sanka from when she was younger are all over the office, with childhood art projects nestled between Jewkes’ numerous award certificates, including a 2024 platinum Lifetime Achievement award for Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Health Research from the SAMRC.
Jewkes, 62, proudly catalogues the artwork and points to a white board covered in cartoon drawings. “I have never been able to bring myself to take down any of the pictures,” she says. Some of them have been there for almost two decades.
Having started working at the SAMRC in the 1990s as the head of Women’s Health Research within the Centre for Epidemiological Research in Southern Africa, Jewkes moved into this particular office in 1997. She is now the executive scientist for research strategy at the SAMRC.
Activist first
Yet she had another calling, one that started the first time she set foot on South African soil – activist. Originally from the UK, Jewkes was 17 years old when she reluctantly agreed to spend nine months in the Transkei, a region in the Eastern Cape which was the first of four territories to nominally be declared “independent” of South Africa in the 1970s – the “independence” was never internationally recognised. Jewkes visited the Transkei in 1980, 14 years before South Africa held its first democratic elections.
“I told them [the organisation that arranged the trip] I didn’t want to go to South Africa, and they’d lied to me. They told me I was going to a newly independent African country. And by the time I’d worked out the reason nobody knew about it was that it didn’t exist, it was too late, and I didn’t want to lose the chance of going away, so I went anyway,” she laughs. She then grows serious as she adds: “But I just found the experience of being in Transkei and seeing apartheid South Africa through my English eyes absolutely horrific.”
When she returned to England, she wasted no time before joining the local anti-apartheid movement. “I ran the health committee, and I was vice chair of the anti-apartheid movement in England for seven years,” she says.
Shifting gears to focus on GBV
Jewkes was 31 when she moved to South Africa in 1994, a mere week after completing the final examination for her Doctorate of Medicine (MD) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. At this point, apartheid was officially over and she turned her focus to gender-based violence (GBV).
“[A]fter 1994, it was easy to shift gears from a focus on anti-apartheid activism into the activism around gender-based violence,” she says.
She says her calling as an activist and the solidarity among colleagues in the field has helped fuel the gruelling and often traumatising research into finding interventions that combat gender-based violence and gender inequality.
“I’ve always seen it as being absolutely essential to combine research with activism and I believe that really solid activism can be bolstered by having a research basis,” she says. “I’ve held a belief that I will incrementally be able to try and contribute towards making the world a better place for women.”
Her work to make the world a better place for women extended into the global arena. From 2000 onwards, she worked with a group in the World Health Organisation (WHO) to set up what is now known as the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Jewkes served as secretary while the initiative was based at the SAMRC for many years. It is now an independent NGO where she serves on the leadership council.
Fighting to get GBV recognised as a health problem
Reflecting on her career, Jewkes says there’s been tremendous progress because gender-based violence is now acknowledged as a problem.
“When I started working in violence against women and girls, it was not recognised as being a health problem anywhere, and in fact it wasn’t recognised as being highly prevalent. It wasn’t recognised as being a major social problem,” Jewkes says. Now though, she says she never has to justify why violence against women is an important issue.
The collective efforts of a group of dedicated researchers, which included Jewkes, was pivotal to reaching this point. This eventually translated to the WHO’s Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women, led by Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno – another leading researcher in the field.
Based on evidence collected by specially trained teams from over 24 000 women in 10 countries, the WHO describes it is a landmark research project. The report’s recommendations include promoting primary prevention, harnessing education systems, strengthening the health sector’s response, supporting women living with violence, sensitising criminal justice systems, and undertaking research.
Jewkes says this work “led to a sort of massive change in the way in which violence against women was viewed”.
A real ‘stickler’ for research
Earlier this year, the academic platform Research.com named Jewkes the number one social sciences and humanities researcher in South Africa, and 85th in the world.
The SAMRC celebrated this accomplishment saying: “Her work symbolises that science is not only about labs and data, but also about people, power, and compassion.”
Jewkes says she is a “real stickler” when it comes to research. “I believe that research has to be conducted properly, and it has to be interpreted properly, and you need to be open to the fact that research doesn’t always tell you what you want it to,” she says. This sentiment, she adds, is closely linked to her activism.
“I have always said that being an activist shouldn’t make you cut corners in terms of your research, and it shouldn’t make you compromise.”
‘A work in progress’
While a lot of progress has been made in recognising the problem of GBV in recent decades, what exactly to do about it remains a challenge. Jewkes says finding interventions to prevent violence against women and girls is a work in progress.
But it is work in progress she’s been knee-deep in. From 2013 to 2020, Jewkes was the director of a global consortium called ‘What works to prevent violence against women and girls’. Through this programme, several different interventions were developed and tested to prevent violence against women and girls across Africa and Asia.
So far, as Jewkes explains, there hasn’t been one clear intervention that can always be relied on to translate to multiple settings, both because the problem is so complex and the interventions themselves are delivered to people by other people.
“In the work we do, we’re not dispensing pills that, once you’ve swallowed, they’re going to have a predictable effect. Our interventions have to be delivered by skilled people, and you have to upskill people by training them [properly],” she says. “It’s work in progress, working out what exactly we should be doing that really is helpful and how do we develop the mechanisms to implement it?” Jewkes says.
“We are a long way away from being able to really roll out extensively high-quality interventions and I think we’re in a position where we have to work where we can with the pockets [of interventions] that are doing well. So, we’re still working more on an incremental basis,” she adds.
But more funding for research into interventions that can help prevent gender-based violence is clearly needed, and Jewkes says this is unlikely to get easier after the United States pulled a significant amount of global aid and research funding. “We still have huge challenges around trying to move the field forward in terms of prevention, huge challenges in terms of getting funding for prevention,” she says.
What to do?
When asked what we need to do to combat gender-based violence, Jewkes says the first step is to have the political will to take the issue on.
She is also in favour of having a knowledge hub that serves as a quality control centre for training the people who are going to deliver interventions on violence against women.
“Our experience has shown that unless we have rigorous quality standards for training and delivering interventions on violence against women, I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll get the type of impact that we want. And it all needs resourcing, quality control process as well as delivery in the first place,” she says.
But the necessary things to support a knowledge hub, among other things, are not necessarily in place yet, despite the launch of a National Strategic Plan on GBV in 2020.
“I don’t see things going in that direction now. In fact, one of the major criticisms [from] our sector has been that despite the early promises, and the development [and launch] of the National Strategic plan…there’s been a failure to properly implement the fundamentals around it, and the failure to resource it,” Jewkes says.
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Another challenge is the interconnectedness of social phenomena that drives violence against women. She says these include gender inequality, poverty, poor mental health, trauma in childhood, exposure to violence, and substance abuse.
Bracelets jangling as she gestures, Jewkes uses the example of alcohol.
“[A]lcohol is a phenomenally important driver of violence, and all of these factors are interconnected…alcohol abuse drives poverty, it impoverishes families and poverty itself drives alcohol abuse,” she says. There are things that can be done about this, but Jewkes says there “doesn’t seem to be the political will to do anything about reducing alcohol consumption”.
She suggests shutting down illegal alcohol outlets and introducing structural measures to try drive low alcohol or non-alcoholic beverage consumption. “There’s a tremendous amount that could be done, but it isn’t being done,” she says with obvious frustration.
“We [in South Africa] are faced with real difficulties and unless we get real transformation economically with a massive increase in employment in this country, it’s hard to see how we’re going to get out of this,” she adds.
Not retiring yet
While these challenges obviously weigh on her, Jewkes appears determined and focused on the task at hand. She assures Spotlight that she’s not retiring anytime soon.
“All the way through the work we’ve done, we’ve believed it’s absolutely essential when we do research, we disseminate the findings, we try and get them out there as far as possible,” she says. “So that the knowledge we generate can be used in some way that is beneficial for women overall in South Africa or globally. And that’s really what’s kept me going.”
Jewkes is currently running a study called Fediša Modikologo, which she explains means “break the cycle”. It aims to recruit about 12 000 women and is set to run for the next five years. “The idea is to really understand the impact of severe intimate partner violence on women, including the health impact – and femicide actually, is part of that – and to understand more about the impact of women’s decisions around whether to stay or leave or get a protection order, and the impact of all of that on their children.”
The study has sites in Tshwane (Gauteng), eThekwini (KwaZulu-Natal), Stellenbosch (Western Cape) and Modimolle (Limpopo).
Jewkes says the Modimolle study site has a special place in her heart. “About 10 years ago, I bought a house in Modimolle. I’ve been living in Pretoria, and we used to go there on weekends and when [the] COVID-19 lockdown came, our whole family decamped to Modimolle,” she says. Chuckling, Jewkes adds that after lockdown, her daughter was adamant to move back to Pretoria while her husband David Jeppe was adamant to stay. So now she splits her work week between two provinces, and she still regularly visits the UK, and her 91-year-old dad.
Jewkes lights up when asked for advice to young researchers considering this field.
“I think it can be an incredibly rewarding area to work in, but like all areas of research, what the space really needs is young people with great ideas, with a passion for generating knowledge and the ability to work quite long hours and in difficult conditions in order to do that,” she says. “But it is important that people need to go into this space recognising the fact that it can be a hard area to work in.”
*This article is part of Spotlight’s 2025 Women in Health series featuring the remarkable contributions of women to healthcare and science.
