What Have We Been Doing Wrong?

Years of work, and we still landed here!!

What does it mean when the people meant to protect you end up agreeing with the person who hurt you?

Not the ones who hurt you directly. The others. The ones standing beside them, nodding. That is the question I have been sitting inside for four days.

I froze the first time I saw it. A woman in a mini skirt, pulled from a bus park in Rubavu. A concert door in Kigali, women turned away for what they were wearing. And then - the part that actually broke something in me - comment after comment agreeing this was fair. Some from other women. Young men saying, plainly, publicly, that if a woman dresses a certain way and something happens to her, she caused it.

I didn't write anything for four days (just reposted). I just sat there, the way you sit with something too large to hold yet.

Here is what makes this harder than outrage alone: this is not a country that is done nothing. We have ministries built for exactly this. We have done years of programs, not just a once-a-year hashtag but multi-year interventions, research tracking how attitudes move inside families over time, months-long behavior change work, community dialogues, 16 Days of Activism every year, and that's only the most visible piece of something much older and bigger than a calendar.

Real money.

Real years.

Real people who believed this mattered - I count myself among them.

So the question is not whether we tried - because we tried. The question is: "With all of that, how did we still land here, in a moment tested in public, where what surfaced was not progress - it was a woman's clothing put on trial, and a crowd cheering the verdict?".

I don't need another evaluation to tell me what people believe. We just watched it, unfiltered. What I actually want - and what I think we owe the next generation - is different. It would matter if the ministries, RIB, Police, etc officially said something now: stood with the women this happened to, condemned what was said online, even without a solution in hand yet. That much is simple, and it should happen.

But that is not where this needs to end. Because a statement is not a reckoning. What I'm asking for is harder: I want the government, the development partners, the civil society organizations, every leadership team working on gender equality, (S)GBV prevention, women and girl's empowerment even those working toward "Umuryango ushoboye kandi utekanye" to sit down, not to plan the next campaign, but actually to ask themselves; what have we been doing wrong, and what are we changing starting now?

Not how we'll show up for the next #16DaysOfActivism and International Women's Day. Not the next report citing how many laws passed or what percentage of seats women hold in parliament - we know that progress is real and it is not enough, because it hasn't touched what people actually believe. That is the sitting-down that hasn't happened. And until it does, painting the front of a house that's already collapsing inside doesn't hold it up.

If we don't do this now, we will not see this exact evaluation again in four years, or ten. We will see something quieter and worse. People will learn that saying this online gets you questioned, maybe arrested so they'll stop saying it online or in public. They won't stop believing it. It will move back into homes, into the way a husband, son, boyfriend, uncle, grandfather speaks to the wife, daughter, mother, sister, girlfriend, aunty, grandmother behind a closed door, restaurant, class, bus where no one is really watching, and no campaign has ever really reached. That is what "no longer visible" looks like when the belief was never actually changed; it doesn't disappear, it just stops being witnessed.

This is why it was never about the clothes. Control was always the disease; the clothing was just where it chose to show itself this time, last time was abazunguzayi, and the next might be you and your life choices. And every woman who repeats "dress decently, respect the culture" is not protecting herself; she is loading the exact justification that could one day be turned on her, or her daughter. I need her to see she is not standing outside this. She's inside it, and it isn't finished with her yet.

What have we been doing wrong?

Maybe we built activities where we needed belief. Activities are easier to fund, easier to report, easier to show a donor - until the moment it is tested, and it isn't there.

I don't have the full answer. But I know we can start by sitting down with what we actually did, and asking, honestly, why it didn't bring the change we said we wanted. Maybe the methods were right, and the follow-through wasn't.

Or maybe we started from the wrong understanding of what needed to change, measuring progress by access and representation, without ever reaching what actually shapes a person when no one is measuring: what they were raised to believe, what they have never had to question, what still moves in them long after the workshop ends. That is what shapes a family. That family shapes a country. That is the layer we never actually got to.

That is harder to put in a report. It might be the only thing worth reporting.

To every girl and woman still carrying what this week confirmed: you were never the problem we needed to solve. You are not what needs to change. We are.

This is my #Agakeregeshwa.

Rugo.