Cornered and criminalised reproductive injustice, violence, and women’s survival strategies in Lorentzville, Johannesburg

This paper explores how women’s survival strategies in Lorentzville, Johannesburg, including transactional sex, informal caregiving, and community food sharing, are shaped and criminalised through intersecting systems of structural violence. Drawing on feminist ethnography and in-depth interviews, the analysis is grounded in intersectional feminist and African feminist frameworks, including structural violence theory, reproductive justice, and Nego-feminism, and employs inductive thematic analysis. The study illustrates how food insecurity, intimate partner violence (IPV), and reproductive injustice intersect within contexts of racialised urban neglect, housing precarity, and exclusion from healthcare and formal work. Participants described navigating coercive control, police harassment, sexual and physical violence, and moralistic gatekeeping from health workers, alongside restricted access to contraception and safe abortion under precarious migration status and overcrowded shelter. These dynamics reveal how IPV functions not only as a symptom of systemic stress but also as a mechanism of control in spaces where women are cornered by abandonment, surveillance, and criminalisation. The paper argues that women’s strategies are rational responses to structural deprivation rather than deviance and calls for trauma-informed reproductive health services, decriminalisation of survival sexual economies, and inclusive urban policies that recognise women’s agency and dignity. The findings hold implications for social work, public health, and urban policy, pointing to the need for integrated, rights-based interventions that address structural violence, strengthen reproductive health access, and support women’s informal strategies rather than criminalising them.