PART II. Why Confusing Violence and GBV Makes Everything Worse

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." James Baldwin.

The Conversation That Keeps Missing People

I have sat in rooms; physical rooms and virtual ones; where people talked about violence and gender-based violence as if they were interchangeable. As if one was just the serious version of the other.

And every time, I noticed the same thing: certain people quietly disappeared from the conversation.

The boy who was beaten at home, regularly, viciously but whose experience didn't map onto what the room was discussing.

The older man in a controlling, emotionally crushing marriage who had no language for what was happening to him because the language available said that men don't experience this.

The teenage girl whose boyfriend monitored her phone, chose her friends, and made her feel insane for questioning it but who wouldn't have called it violence because there were no bruises.

When we blur violence and GBV, or when we collapse them into each other without care, people fall through the cracks. Not because we meant to drop them. But because the lens we were using couldn't see them.

They Are Similar. They Are Not the Same.

Part of why the confusion persists is that violence and GBV share so much surface.

Both thrive in silence. Both are normalized within the spaces they inhabit. Both leave psychological marks that outlast the physical ones. Both are routinely minimized — by the people who cause them, by the communities that witness them, and sometimes even by the people experiencing them, who have been taught to call their suffering by softer names.

In Rwanda, in many homes across East Africa, there are phrases that function like a hand placed firmly over the mouth of anyone thinking of speaking.

Ni uko byahoze. That's how it has always been.

Kwihangana niwo muti. Endurance is the solution.

Bibaho. These things happen.

These phrases don't distinguish between violence and GBV. They silence both. And in doing so, they protect neither survivor.

So yes, the similarities are real and they matter. They tell us that both forms of harm deserve to be taken seriously, spoken about openly, and addressed with genuine urgency.

But the similarities are not the whole story.

What Gets Lost When We Stop at "Violence"

When we speak only of violence in general; without naming gender; we make it easier to ignore something specific and structural.

Gender-based violence is not random. It follows patterns that map almost perfectly onto gender norms; onto who is expected to obey, who is expected to provide, who is allowed to leave, who will be believed.

When a woman stays in an abusive marriage, it is rarely because she has not noticed the harm. It is often because she has been taught that her worth is tied to that marriage. Because she knows her family will ask what she did to cause this. Because she has watched other women who left be shamed into poverty or silence.

That is not just violence. That is a system. And if our response doesn't address the system, we are rearranging furniture in a burning building.

Calling it only "violence" - without the gender lens - lets the system off the hook. It locates the problem in individual behavior rather than in the collective beliefs that enable and protect that behavior.

What Gets Lost When We Stop at "GBV"

The opposite problem is equally real.

When every conversation about harm gets funneled exclusively into GBV frameworks; frameworks that, in many contexts, center women's experiences; other people's pain becomes unintelligible.

Boys who are abused. Men in relationships built on control and emotional destruction. Children whose harm doesn't fit neatly into gendered categories. Elderly people whose vulnerability is not primarily about gender but about age, dependency, and isolation.

These experiences are real. They are serious. And a framework that cannot hold them does those people a specific kind of damage, it tells them, in the most subtle way, that their pain doesn't count. That there is no room for them in the conversation about harm.

I don't think that's the intention. But intention is not the same as impact.

The Danger Is Not Choosing the Wrong Word

Choosing incorrectly between "violence" and "GBV" in a casual conversation is not the crisis.

The crisis is when institutions, policies, and communities structure their entire response around one lens and cannot see what the other lens would reveal.

The crisis is when a shelter exists for women but has no plan for the children brought there because the conversation never extended to them.

The crisis is when a young man's cry for help is met with silence because the only language available for this kind of harm was not written with him in mind.

We need both lenses. Not competing. Not taking turns. Together, held deliberately, with enough intellectual honesty to acknowledge that harm is complicated and language has limits.

Because the goal has never been to get the vocabulary right. The goal is to make sure fewer people fall through the cracks.

Rugo,

A Piece of My Mind.