Culture of silence fuels gender-based violence

I was largely thinking about the 16 days of activism on November 24, due to be launched the next day as I prepared to attend a much billed motivational talk. I went to the Dr Robert Burale talk not knowing what to expect and was surprised by the numbers.

I must give a disclaimer that it was the first time I attended a motivational talk. As such, I did not expect so many people, given the fee involved. Yet, the event was oversubscribed.

Hopefully, the organisers will in future close tickets a day before or have a threshold within which to say, ‘we are sold out’ to enable them plan better.

I wondered, are people that hungry for motivation or is it the profile of the speaker? I had not heard about the speaker before but chose to go anyway. After all, I had just finished reading an interesting book by Joan Mugenzi, ‘Corporates at Crossroads’ that morning, and thought I am missing something not attending such events.

I hope no one gets me wrong. It is not that I do not value motivational talks, I just motivate myself in different ways. The subject of the talk was career and personal transformation. I can understand why the meeting was oversubscribed. Are we all not looking for some form of personal transformation?

Dr Burale mainly focused on his personal journey of transformation, speaking from his heart as he pointed out. He traced his journey from when a housemaid in his home molested him, and how that had defined much of his life. He spoke of going to boarding school in lower primary and going to study in the United Kingdom as well as his struggles with addiction to strip clubs and punishing women for whatever one woman had done to him in his childhood.

He further talked about his one-year marriage and divorce, his mounting debt and the struggle with various auctioneers when the people he owed money came up. 

His life, dependent on looking corporate and borrowing to sustain it and attempting to commit suicide were as dramatic as they were presented. Much of the talk revolved around these unfortunate turns in his life and a small portion on rising and becoming the person he is now, his ambitions to be the President of Kenya one day, his daughter and being a pastor.

Like I said, I did not know what to expect. Linking his childhood abuse to his life’s choices, that must have created a lot of suffering for himself and others he engaged with was the highlight.

Many people carry baggage into the future, rarely dealing with who or what hurt them as children, and their untampered ambition, which in turn creates a lot of suffering for all around them, is not just a Burale story. It was familiar. I am sure the hundreds of people in the audience, saw a corporate character or two that have lived the former Burale life with a few variations. And the tragedy is how often, many people suffer silently and allow violence to continue. 

In a recent discussion where women were asked how many of them had experienced sexual harassment in the newsroom, so many participants put up their hand. I followed up with a question, ‘how many of had reported using frameworks in their workplace, only three said they did. The others were silent, maybe some left the newsroom or found ways to cope.

The problem is, we will say so much during these 16 days of activism against gender based violence. Infact, I have already seen great coverage in the papers about gender-based violence. Yet, after the 16 days, we will move to the next trending things.

The other issue is that gender-based violence in its many forms, happens within larger contexts of historical, political, social and cultural violence, complete with how these are normalised. In general, more women we know suffer from gender-based violence than men. But it is not hard to see, that much of that violence meted on women, is as a result of unresolved social issues. Women accept them because of social cultural norms that normalise them.

We must do everything to safeguard our children from various forms of abuse. It is the kind of thing that messes up the world in much bigger ways. I have learnt that some people’s behaviour screams more of how much help they need and how much they missed during their upbringing. Unfortunately, most times we suffer silently.

We need to cultivate a culture of speaking up. I am not sure I was motivated by that talk, but it offered an incredible insight into many things. While we think abuse is a thing of those without good education, we need to be alert to all sources of abuse as Dr Burale demonstrated.

Ms Emilly Maractho (PhD) is the director of Africa Policy Centre and senior lecturer at Uganda Christian University.

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