This is what domestic violence looks like from the inside: a slow erasure. Not always a bruise. Sometimes it is a word repeated until it becomes believed, worthless, stupid, nothing without me. Sometimes it is a door locked from the outside. Sometimes it is money withheld, children weaponized, isolation rendered so total that the walls of the house become the borders of an entire world. By the time the fist arrives, and it does arrive, she has already been imprisoned for months, sometimes years.
By Fanta Kamara
Every eleven seconds, somewhere on this earth, a woman is beaten by the man who claims to love her. Not by a stranger. Not by an enemy. By the man whose name she may carry, whose children she raised, whose household she holds together. The perpetrator is always intimate. The violence is always systematic. And the world, by and large, continues to call it a private matter. What absurd Private Matter???
It is not a private matter. Let’s declare it for what it should be, a global emergency, and the silence surrounding it is not neutrality, but complicity dressed in the language of discretion.
THE NUMBERS THAT SHOULD SHAME US ALL
WHO (World Health Organization) estimates that 1 in 3 women globally, approximately one billion human beings, have experienced physical or sexual violence, predominantly at the hands of an intimate partner. This statistic is not confined to the Global South, to poverty, illiteracy, or to any single religion; it represents the reality of women everywhere. In sub-Saharan Africa, where cultural norms around masculinity remain ferociously entrenched, the figures are catastrophic, with soaring rates of intimate partner violence exceeding 40 % in multiple countries. In South Asia, women are beaten, burned, and disappeared with a regularity that governments have bureaucratized into near-silence. In the United States, a country that exports its ideals of freedom and human dignity with extraordinary confidence, the CDC reports that more than 1 in 4 women has experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner. In the United Kingdom, France, Germany, every Western democracy with a women’s rights record it considers impeccable, women are being killed by the men who claim to love them. Domestic violence does not respect passports. It does not honor degrees, wealth, or faith. It is the one truly universal institution humanity has never managed to dismantle.
That universality should haunt us. Instead, it has made us comfortable; we’ve normalized it.
We have made peace with it through language, calling it a ‘domestic dispute,’ a ‘family matter,’ a ‘private tragedy,’ as though the site of a crime determines its severity. We have made peace with it through culture, through proverbs that instruct women to endure, through theologies that frame submission as sacred, through communities that treat a woman’s bruised face as her own business and no one else’s. We have made peace with it through law, through under-resourced police departments that dismiss calls from known addresses, through prosecutors who decline to pursue cases without a victim’s cooperation as if they have forgotten the terrified calculus that makes that cooperation impossible, through judges who sentence men who murder their partners to terms shorter than those handed down for property crimes. Every institution designed to be a wall between a woman and her killer became instead a corridor through which the killer passed unimpeded.
THE SCANDAL OF SILENCE
To the families who tell their daughters to go back: you are not protecting a marriage. You are promoting violence. Every ‘try harder,’ every ‘pray about it,’ every ‘think about the children’ is a sentence handed to a woman who came to you for Rescue. Your tradition does not excuse your Cowardice. Your theology does not sanctify her bruises.
To the pastors, imams, elders, and counselors who instruct women to endure abuse: you have confused submission with sanctity and suffering with spiritual depth. No scripture, in any tradition, in any language, in any century, commands a woman to die for her marriage, to die for a relationship. If your interpretation of faith demands that, then the failure is entirely in your reading, it’s in your head, perhaps satisfying some sick desire; you’d require as much of a psychiatric intervention as patients already experiencing psych confinements.
To the neighbors who hear the screams and turn up the television or turn away, say nothing, because it’s not his/her business. To the employer, the coworkers who notice the bruises and say nothing. To the politicians who defund shelters, do not prioritize the well-being of women, and strip legal protections in the name of fiscal austerity: your silence is not innocence. The blood is on every hand that knew and chose stillness. Everyone! Shame on You!
She doesn’t scream. That’s what they never tell you. She has long stopped screaming, because screaming taught him where the limit was, and she learned fast, in a way that only the truly terrified learn, that silence keeps you safer than sound. She lies still in the dark, calculating the distance between his breathing and the door, measuring the geometry of escape not in meters but probabilities. She is awake at 3 a.m., tossing and turning, in a home that stopped being a home the first time his hand met her face. She is a wife in Liberia. A mother in Lagos, a sister in Mumbai. She is a graduate student in New York. A daughter in London. She is every woman you have ever loved, and she is being slowly picked apart.
And to the justice systems that prosecute fewer than 5% of reported cases in many African jurisdictions, that routinely disbelieve women, grant bail to men who have promised to kill, and then do nothing when they make good on that promise: you are not a justice system. You are a bureaucracy for the protection of abusers. Shame on you!
Silence in the face of knowable violence is a choice, and choices carry consequences. When a woman dies at the hands of a man whose violence was witnessed and unreported by ten people who “didn’t want to get involved,” those ten people are part of the story. Complicity does not require cruelty. It requires only inaction, sustained long enough.
The house is not worth it. The status is not worth it. The marriage is not worth your life. That entire relationship is a Lie!
No prayer will rewire a man determined to destroy you.
THE DANGEROUS LIES WOMEN ARE TOLD TO BELIEVE
There is a particular cruelty in the rationalizations that keep women in danger. The lifestyle. The wedding ring. Please Wake Up!
This is my plea to the woman reading this still inside a relationship that is making her smaller, quieter and more afraid; and this is said with every ounce of compassion that can be held alongside a hard, irreducible truth: staying is not safety. Staying is a risk recalculated every day in the desperate hope that the mathematics will somehow change without any variable shifting. They will not change. The research on this is devastating in its consistency: abuse escalates. It does not plateau. It does not resolve itself; it does not respond to patience or prayer or strategic silence or the performance of compliance.
Do not Live your life for Social Media Likes. The man who hits once is statistically more likely to hit again, and to hit harder, and to keep escalating until either intervention or death interrupts the pattern. The social standing is not worth it. The marriage, even one with history, children, and shared decades, is not worth your life. None of it matters, and if you insist otherwise, then answer me this: Can you endure another blow to the eye, another punch to your gut? Do you enjoy waking up battered and bruised? If your response is not an immediate No, remember this, there is no patience strategic enough to outlast violence that has decided it owns you. Love does not look like this. God does not require this for you. You deserve to LIVE.
Every woman who stays because she has been told the alternative is worse has been cataclysmically lied to. The alternative is a door. And YES, it opens.
Again, every justification you construct to remain, the children need their father, he will change, judgment from the community — what will people say, I cannot afford to leave, leaving will make him angrier, I still love him, is a rationale built on the premise that you control the outcome. Newsflash, You do Not! The abuser controls the outcome, and he has already demonstrated what he is willing to do with that control.
Far from blame, consider this an alarm sounding in the direction of every woman who has confused endurance with survival. Endurance in this case is not virtuous, nor an accolade; it is the slow consumption of a life by a force it cannot overcome alone. Survival requires departure. Love distorted by systematic violence is not love; it is captivity dressed in the language of love, and no amount of waiting will change the architecture of a cage.
False security is not safety. It is a countdown to your demise.
TO THE WOMEN WHO LEFT
For the women who packed a bag while he slept. Who called a friend at 2 a.m. with nothing but their children and the truth. Who sat in a courtroom and said, out loud, what had been done to them, not knowing if they would be believed. Who rebuilt a life from the rubble of one that tried to erase them.
You are not a cautionary tale. Your leaving is not the end but the beginning of everything the violence was never supposed to allow you to have. There is no honor in remaining inside an arrangement that is actively trying to destroy you. Leaving is not a weakness. It is the most courageous act of self-preservation a human being can perform, and it deserves to be named exactly as it is SURVIVAL. DEFIANCE. DELIVERANCE.
We see you. We celebrate you with the full weight of these words.
THE RECKONING
Societies that normalize violence against women have forfeited their right to claim moral authority on any other issue. You cannot champion development, democracy, or human dignity while women in your communities are being murdered in their own kitchens, on farms, in their backyards, in their bedrooms. The positions are incompatible. The cognitive dissonance required to hold them simultaneously is not nuance; it is hypocrisy, and it has cost enough lives.
What is required now is not awareness. Frankly, we’re sick of it, certainly not another fake News women’s holiday or hollow campaigns. We are past all of that. What is required is legal architecture that prosecutes abusers expeditiously, funds shelters, protects survivors, and treats intimate partner violence with the criminal weight it deserves. What is required is a cultural framework that stops treating a woman’s survival as a threat to family dignity. What is required is zero tolerance, beyond a slogan, as enforceable policy, consistent practice, and the non-negotiable baseline of any society that wishes to call itself civilized.
A woman is not a repository for a man’s violence, Not Today, Not Ever!
SOURCES
World Health Organization. (2021). Violence against women prevalence estimates, 2018. WHO Press. | UN Women. (2023). Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women. | South African Police Service Annual Report 2022/23. | UK Office for National Statistics: Homicide in England and Wales, 2022/23. | U.S. CDC, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). | UNICEF. (2022). Demographic and Health Surveys, East Africa Regional Analysis.
