Part I. Before GBV Had a Name: Understanding Violence.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." Alice Walker

There Was Harm Before There Were Words For It

I want to start with something small.

A child who flinches every time someone raises their voice. Not because they were ever hit. But because in their home, raised voices always came before something broke — a plate, a silence, a person.

That child does not have a word for what they are living in. They just know that their stomach turns before the shouting even starts. That their body learned, before their brain could, that something here is not safe.

That is violence. And it was happening long before anyone sat in a workshop and gave it a definition.

What Violence Actually Is - Before We Complicate It

The World Health Organization defines violence as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, that results in harm. Physical injury. Psychological damage. Deprivation. Sometimes death.

But I think definitions are always late arrivals.

Harm arrives first. The word comes after. And by the time the word comes, many people have already spent years of their lives inside something they couldn't name, wondering if what they were feeling was real, or if they were simply too sensitive for the world they were living in.

Violence is not only the dramatic thing. The obvious thing. The thing that leaves marks visible to strangers.

Violence is also the slow erosion. The home where one person's anger dictates how everyone else breathes. The classroom where a child is publicly shamed until humiliation becomes their normal. The relationship where love and fear are so tangled together you genuinely cannot tell which is which.

Violence wears many faces. And in many communities; including the ones I grew up around; it was not always called violence. It was called culture. It was called discipline. It was called love, even.

And because it was called those things, it was allowed to stay.

Then Something Shifted

At some point, researchers, advocates, and survivors started noticing a pattern.

Not just that harm was happening. But that certain kinds of harm were happening to certain people, in predictable ways, for predictable reasons.

That women were more likely to be killed by someone they knew and loved than by a stranger.

That girls in some communities were being pulled from school not because of poverty alone, but because their gender made their education negotiable.

That boys were being taught to perform a version of strength that required them to swallow every feeling that made them seem soft — and that this too was a form of damage, passed quietly from one generation to the next.

This is where Gender-Based Violence entered the conversation.

Not to replace the broader understanding of violence. But to name something specific within it.

GBV Is Not Just Violence With a Label

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is harm that is rooted in gender inequality. It happens because of gender. It is sustained by gender norms. And its effects fall in patterns that follow gender lines.

According to UNFPA and the African Union, GBV is not primarily about individual bad actors. It is about systems; the inherited expectations that tell us who is allowed to hold power, who must submit, who must endure, and whose pain is considered private.

That is a different conversation from violence alone.

Both matter. But they are not the same.

Knowing this is not an academic exercise. When we cannot tell the difference between general violence and gender-based violence, we design responses that solve half the problem. We treat symptoms. We miss root causes. We help some people and inadvertently render others invisible.

A woman in an abusive marriage is not just experiencing violence. She is experiencing harm that is enabled by specific beliefs about what a wife owes her husband, what leaving means for her reputation, and who the community will believe when she speaks.

That specificity matters. Because it is exactly where the intervention needs to happen.

Why This Is Personal, Even When It Feels Theoretical

I think about that child again. The one who flinches before the shouting starts.

That child may grow up and never have access to the word "violence." They may call what happened "how things were." They may pass a version of it on without ever meaning to, because no one ever showed them what the alternative looked like.

Naming things is not just an intellectual act. It is the beginning of accountability. The beginning of choice. The beginning of saying: this happened, it was real, and it did not have to be this way.

Before GBV had a name, people were still living inside it. Still surviving it. Still carrying it silently in their bodies and in their families.

The name didn't create the harm. But the name gives us something to hold, something to challenge, something to begin to dismantle.

And that, I think, is where everything starts.

Rugo,

A Piece of My Mind.

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