PART III. Violence Doesn't Wait for Adulthood

"We are the ones we have been waiting for." June Jordan

It Starts Earlier Than We Admit

There is a version of this conversation that only begins in adulthood. That talks about marriages, about workplaces, about headlines; as if violence and gender-based harm are things we encounter only once we are old enough to have a public life.

But I keep thinking about children.

About how early the lessons start. About how long they last.

A girl who is seven years old, told to cover herself because men will look. Not told that the looking is the problem. Told that her body is the problem. She doesn't understand it fully yet. But her body registers it as a fact about herself: I am something that must be managed.

A boy who is nine, crying after being bullied, whose father says boys don't cry; and who learns in that moment that pain is something to be hidden, not felt. Not processed. Just swallowed and converted into something harder.

These are not dramatic moments. That is precisely the point.

The most formative lessons about gender, power, and harm are delivered quietly. In passing. In corrections that feel like love but function like cages.

Childhood: Where the Blueprint Is Written

In many Rwandan homes, and across much of East Africa, physical punishment remains widely practiced and culturally defended as discipline. Research consistently shows the harm it causes, not just physically, but to a child's developing sense of safety, self-worth, and trust in authority.

But beyond the physical, there is the emotional architecture being built in childhood.

Girls learn that their value is relational - tied to how they serve, how they behave, how little space they take up. Boys learn that their value is performative - tied to what they achieve, how much they can tolerate, how rarely they need anyone.

Neither of these lessons is a neutral observation about human nature. They are instructions. And children absorb instructions from the adults and environments around them with the complete trust that those instructions reflect reality.

What we teach children in their earliest years about gender, about power, about whose pain matters, that becomes the soil in which everything else grows. Including harm.

Adolescence: When It Becomes Relational

By the time a young person reaches adolescence, those early lessons have become instincts.

And instincts shape relationships.

The girl who learned that her role is to accommodate will not immediately recognize when a boyfriend's jealousy has crossed into control. It will feel familiar. It will even feel like love, because love and monitoring were never clearly separated in what she observed growing up.

The boy who learned that asking for help is weakness will not easily identify emotional manipulation in a relationship. He may not have the language for it. He may dismiss what he's feeling because the culture around him has no sympathy for men who are struggling inside intimate relationships.

This is the life stage where GBV takes on some of its most insidious forms - dating violence, digital control, coercive relationships that are maintained not through physical force alone but through psychological erosion.

And it is also the life stage most often skipped in how we talk about this. We talk about child protection. We talk about adult survivors. The middle - the years when patterns are being learned and reinforced in real time - often goes under-addressed.

Adulthood and Marriage: When the Silence Becomes an Institution

Marriage, in many of our communities, is where the silence becomes structural.

The pressure to stay - for children, for family, for reputation - is not just social pressure. It is economic. It is legal, in contexts where women have limited property rights. It is religious. It is the weight of everything a woman has been told about her worth and her duty pressing down on one specific decision.

WHO data and national surveys across East Africa consistently show that intimate partner violence remains among the highest reported forms of GBV. And one of the most consistent barriers to addressing it is this: both the community and the survivors themselves have often come to accept it as an unfortunate but normal part of marriage.

Men are not untouched by this either. Many men in our communities are trapped by the same gender norms in a different way; expected to be providers without being allowed to be vulnerable, expected to lead without being supported, expected to carry without ever being seen to crack. That distortion is also harm. It is less visible, less spoken of, but it is real.

The Generation Between Endurance and Refusal

We are living through something unusual right now.

Our parents' generation largely endured. Not because they lacked intelligence or strength. But because the tools for naming harm were not available to them, and the cost of speaking - social exclusion, family shame, economic collapse - was genuinely too high.

Our generation is learning to name things. Slowly, painfully, sometimes clumsily. The language is newer. The permission to use it is fragile. But it is being built.

The generation coming after us - if we do this work - may not inherit the silence.

Culture changes. That is not a threat to who we are. It is proof that we are alive.

Choosing what to carry forward and what to put down is not betrayal. It is the most honest thing a generation can do for the one that follows.

Rugo, A Piece of My Mind.