“He’s a good man. He provides for his family. He goes to church every Sunday.”
I’ve heard these words used to defend men who have done unspeakable things, as if being a good provider cancels out being a predator. As if Sunday attendance erases Monday’s violence. We’ve built entire systems around protecting men’s reputations while burying women’s pain, and we’ve gotten so good at it that we don’t even notice we’re doing it anymore.
Last year, I watched something unfold that made my blood run cold. A young woman, let’s call her Adanna, posted about her experience with sexual harassment by a prominent figure in her industry. She didn’t name him initially, just shared her story. Within hours, people who claimed to know her started dissecting her character online. They questioned her strong opinions online. They found old photos of her at parties and used them as evidence of her “loose morals.” Someone even suggested she was doing this for attention because her career wasn’t going well.
The man? His name stayed protected. His friends rallied around him. His colleagues vouched for his character. Meanwhile, Adanna became a cautionary tale for every other woman watching: Speak up, and we’ll destroy you.
This is how silence protects abusers, not through dramatic acts of cover-up, but through small, everyday choices that make speaking up more dangerous than staying quiet.
I recently watched “Haq” on Netflix, and something about it blew my mind. The film follows a woman named Shazia who’s been abandoned by her husband after years of marriage. She’s left fighting a legal system that’s stacked against her just to get basic financial support, just to be treated with dignity. What struck me wasn’t some dramatic courtroom showdown; it was how the film showed gender-based violence in its quietest, most insidious forms.
Because that’s the thing we often miss. Gender-based violence isn’t always a beating or a forced assault. It’s woven into the structure of inequality itself. The emotional betrayal. The abandonment. The economic precarity that leaves a woman vulnerable. The legal systems that dismiss her needs as irrelevant.
Shazia starts as someone loyal and devoted, the kind of wife society celebrates. Then life happens, and she’s discarded, and suddenly all that devotion counts for nothing. Watching her navigate a system designed to silence her, I kept thinking about how many women I know who have lived some version of this story. Not the exact details, maybe, but the feeling of it. The sense that speaking up for yourself, demanding what you deserve, is somehow an act of rebellion that will be punished.
The film refuses to make her a one-dimensional victim. You see her sense of injury, her quiet rage, her growing refusal to accept what’s been done to her. And the husband isn’t portrayed as some cartoon villain either, which somehow makes it worse. He’s just entitled. Dismissive. Self-justifying. He genuinely believes he’s done nothing wrong because the system has always told him he hasn’t. That felt more realistic and, honestly, more infuriating than any over-the-top villain could be.
What “Haq” does brilliantly is show how patriarchy hides behind tradition and religion to excuse mistreatment. How men use cultural tools to justify inequality. How a woman’s voice gets dismissed not through dramatic silencing but through bureaucratic indifference, through laws that weren’t written with her in mind, through a society that sees her personhood as negotiable.
There’s a scene that stayed with me where Shazia is questioned about her case, and you can see the exhaustion on her face. Not just from the fight itself but from having to justify her existence, having to prove she deserves basic human dignity. That’s what abuse does when it’s systemic. It makes you work to convince people that you matter.
I think about the women I know who’ve tried to break through these systems. The energy it takes. The emotional labour of convincing people that what happened to you actually happened, that it was wrong, that you deserve better. The exhausting work of proving you’re credible while your abuser gets the benefit of the doubt by default.
One of my cousins once told me about her university experience. There was a lecturer whom everyone loved. He cracked jokes in class and seemed genuinely invested in students’ success, but had been sexually harassing female students for years. Everyone knew. It was an open secret whispered in hostels and discussed in hushed tones at the cafeteria. Nobody reported him because he had connections. He was friends with the dean. He mentored successful alumni who sang his praises.
“We just learned to avoid being alone with him,” my cousin said.
Think about that for a second. An entire generation of young women is developing survival strategies around one predator because reporting him felt impossible. The silence gave him years to continue his pattern while his victims learned to shrink themselves, to be careful, to stay safe by staying quiet.
We tell women to speak up, then punish them when they do. We say we believe survivors, then immediately start looking for reasons not to. We claim we want justice, but we’ve built systems that make seeking it feel like a second violation.
The silence around these power imbalances protects the structure itself. We’re not supposed to question it too loudly. We’re meant to smile and say congratulations and ignore the uncomfortable questions about agency, about grooming, about what happens when the imbalance of power is that extreme. Because to question it would mean examining how many of our accepted social arrangements rely on similar dynamics, just less visible ones.
I met a lady named Ngozi some years ago. She shared something that stayed with me. She’d been assaulted by a family friend when she was fifteen. When she finally told her mother at seventeen, her mother cried, held her, and believed her. Then she said, “We can’t tell anyone else. It will ruin both families.”
Ngozi said that the moment of being believed felt like finally breathing after being underwater. Then the second half of her mother’s response pushed her back under. “I spent years angry at my mother,” she told us. “But I’ve come to understand she was just as trapped as I was. She knew speaking up would turn me into the problem, not him.”
That’s the trap, isn’t it? Even the people who believe you, who love you, who want to help, often can’t see a path forward that doesn’t destroy you in the process. So they choose silence too, not because they don’t care, but because they’ve watched what happens to women who speak.
The protection of abusers happens in layers. There’s the immediate circle, family and close friends who might know but choose denial because the truth is too uncomfortable. Then there’s the community layer, people who’ve heard whispers but decide it’s not their business, or that surely there must be another explanation. Finally, there’s the societal layer, the deep cultural beliefs that prioritise harmony over honesty, that value a man’s potential over a woman’s pain.
Each layer reinforces the others. When the family stays silent, the community feels justified in its inaction. When the community looks away, society’s structures remain unchanged. And the abuser? He learns that there are no real consequences. That his reputation will be protected. That he can continue.
The questions survivors face when they come forward are designed to discredit, not to understand. “Why did you wait so long to report?” As if trauma operates on a schedule. “Why were you there in the first place?” As if location determines consent. “What were you wearing?” As if fabric choices justify violence. These aren’t questions seeking truth; they’re accusations wearing question marks.
There’s a particular cruelty in how we handle these situations. We demand perfect victims. Women who reported immediately, who have witnesses, who never smiled at their abuser or accepted his help or continued working with him. Real trauma doesn’t create perfect victims. It creates people trying to survive, making complicated choices in impossible situations.
What “Haq” reminded me of is that sometimes the most insidious forms of gender violence are the ones you don’t see on screen but feel in the silence between the lines. The film doesn’t show explicit sexual violence or physical abuse. Instead, it shows the violence that’s social and legal. The denial of personhood. The way language and law can be weaponised against a woman. It’s a reminder that harm doesn’t always shout; often it whispers through policy and culture.
The courtroom scenes in the film become a metaphor for every space where women have to fight to be heard. The restraint in the storytelling makes the moments when Shazia stands up, when she speaks, when she insists she has rights, hit harder. Because we’ve all been in rooms where speaking up felt impossible. Where the cost of being heard seemed too high.
But something is shifting. however slowly and painfully.
I’m seeing more women refuse to be silent. Not because it’s gotten easier, it hasn’t, but because they’ve decided that carrying the weight alone is no longer an option. I’ve been working on something myself, a trauma-informed digital mental health platform for SGBV survivors across Africa. The more I listen to survivors’ stories, the more I realise how desperately we need spaces where women can access support without fear of judgment or exposure. Where breaking the silence doesn’t mean breaking yourself in the process.
My goal isn’t just to create another mental health app. It’s to build something that understands that for many survivors, speaking up means risking everything. Family relationships. Community standing. Economic security. Sometimes, even physical safety. We need digital spaces that meet women where they are, that understand the specific cultural dynamics we navigate, that provide pathways to healing without requiring them to expose themselves to more harm.
The mental health consequences of silence are staggering. Survivors who can’t speak their truth often internalise it as shame. They carry it in their bodies, their relationships, their sense of self. Studies show that survivors who are believed and supported have better mental health outcomes than those who face disbelief or blame. It’s not just about the original trauma; it’s about what happens next.
This is where technology and culturally sensitive support become critical. We need spaces where survivors can access help without fear of judgment. Where they can connect with therapists who understand trauma and the specific cultural dynamics we navigate. Where they can find community with others who’ve walked similar paths.
It’s time to expand our cultural values to include real compassion for survivors. Our emphasis on family and community is beautiful. But it becomes toxic when it requires survivors to sacrifice their healing for someone else’s comfort. True communal values would mean the community wraps around survivors, not around their abusers.
Every survivor who speaks up, despite the costs, is challenging the entire infrastructure of silence. She’s saying that her truth matters more than someone else’s comfort. She’s modelling for the next generation that they don’t have to carry what isn’t theirs to carry
Our cultures taught us that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to heal one. A village that believes in survivors. That prioritises their safety and healing over abusers’ reputations. That builds systems of support rather than systems of silence.
Every survivor deserves not just to survive, but to thrive. And every voice that breaks the silence, no matter how shaky or scared, makes that thriving more possible for the women coming after her. The conversation is changing. The infrastructure is cracking. And the voices are just getting heard.
