Violence has a gender

On gendered violence and paedophilia.

In another life, you are excited to be alive and strutting around continents in high heels and overpriced silk dresses that cling to your body in all the right places.

But that’s not your life. Instead, you are tired of your existence and cannot walk in heels. You spend your days struggling to get out of bed and scrolling Twitter till your eyes hurt and the liquid starts to pour.

Twitter is the perfect social media platform for you. You don’t want to entertain your own thoughts so you busy yourself reading other people’s thoughts till you develop a parasocial relationship with them. Sometimes, someone articulates the way you feel perfectly. It makes you feel so seen, you hit the repost button expeditiously.

Twitter is also the worst. It is a breeding ground for the vilest people. There’s news of a young girl who was raped to death and it’s men in the comments making jokes. A victim calls out her abuser and it’s rape apologists asking why she went to his house. You use the block button expeditiously.

The algorithm is cruel. It pushes unpleasant things in your face, forcing you to look until you can’t take it anymore. Until it triggers all the memories that you have carefully stashed away.

You learned early to avoid the straying hands of older men, to brush off their sticky gazes, to zigzag out of their big bodies before they laid their hands on you.

You wish you didn’t know what it felt like for a man to look at you with the intention of breaking you. They made you feel like you had no right to your own body, these men. They looked at you and saw something to be dominated and conquered. When you read about yet another girl that was raped, the memories froth to the surface and all the madness in your head comes out to play.

You started growing breasts when you were 8, and your mother acted as though it was a national disaster. Later, you would come to understand her worry but at the time, you didn’t understand the histrionics that accompanied your budding breasts. She gave instructions for you to press and knead the new growth on your chest till it flattened. And because you didn’t really care for the breasts, you did it. But your body did not yield— your breasts continued to grow. Your mother said it was way too early for you to be growing breasts and this new growth would bring unwanted attention.

She was right.

It was then you learned that the word ‘no’ has very little heft; it is worthless. There was a man who was eleven years older who pried your legs open and invaded your body even after you said no countless times. Prior to him, there was the man who held your shoulders with his heavy hands and forced his tongue into your mouth. Your no didn’t matter to them. And because you were so young and scared, you bound your mouth and never spoke about it to anyone.

So every time you see news or posts about gender based violence and paedophilia, anger bubbles in you and you become fraught with the urgency to protect women and girls from the violence that is man.

You still haven’t recovered from the news of Deborah who was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend. You imagine what her last moments must have felt like. You imagine that she tried to escape him but couldn’t. You imagined the fear she must have felt when she realized she was trapped in her own home. You stare at her pictures for far too long. You see the joy dancing in her eyes and you feel so sad and weak. She was an interior decorator. You think about how all her ambitions have just ceased to exist, how her life was cut short. Yet the world keeps spinning. Life moved on. So many other women who have been killed in this cruel way and life moved on.

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Gendered violence is pervasive in West Africa, with Nigeria having the third highest rate in the world. According to researchers, the alarming rate of gender based violence can be traced to gender roles, the imbalance in power dynamics and normalization of male aggression and domination. The men have skewed opinions about sexual violence and are most likely to blame women for rape.

One in three women have experienced sexual violence. Women around the world are plagued with paranoia and fear and you are not left out. Your friend tells you about the time she had to run home because a strange man kept calling her and following her till she got home. And even though she talked about it in a way that was meant to be funny, you saw the fear. You hate what the continued violence against women has done to you and other women. You hate how you sometimes feel like a visitor to your own body because of the beady leers of these men. You cannot understand why paedophilia is treated with such laxity. Out of all the things that bother you, this is the one that breaks you.