"The Question I stopped asking"

Why Wasn't She Believed?

I didn't discover gender-based violence as an issue in a policy paper or a classroom lecture. I discovered it the way most people do by paying attention to what was already happening around me.

Years ago, I volunteered to teach underprivileged children in Nigeria. I expected to be teaching literacy and arithmetic. What I actually learned had very little to do with the curriculum. I watched children disappear from class not because they stopped wanting to learn, but because something at home, or on the walk to school, or in the wider structure around them, made staying impossible. Some of those reasons were about poverty. Some, I came to understand later, were about violence, and about the silence that surrounds it.

That experience reframed inequality for me. It stopped being an abstract concept and became something built assembled, piece by piece, out of institutions that don't respond, cultural norms that go unquestioned, and funding that arrives after the damage is already done, if it arrives at all. Once you see inequality that way, you can't easily see it as fate again. Something that is built can also be rebuilt. Something produced can be redesigned.

That idea has stayed at the centre of my work ever since, particularly in how I think and write about gender-based violence.

One belief I keep coming back to is this: GBV is not inevitable. It is produced. Not by any single villain, but by an entire ecosystem — weak governance, diffuse accountability, funding that treats prevention as an afterthought rather than infrastructure, and cultural narratives that decide, often unconsciously, whose pain is taken seriously and whose isn't. When people ask why gender-based violence persists despite decades of awareness campaigns, my honest answer is that awareness was never the missing piece. Systems were.

Nowhere is that clearer to me than in a single, familiar question: "Why didn't she leave?"

It's a question I've heard asked instinctively, almost reflexively, whenever a survivor's story becomes public. It sounds neutral. It even sounds like concern. But sit with it for a moment, and you start to notice what it actually does it quietly shifts the burden of explanation onto the survivor, before anyone has asked what was done to her, or by whom, or why the systems meant to protect her failed to do so.

The more I've written and spoken about this, the more I've come to believe that the question is asking the wrong thing entirely. The more useful, more honest question is: "Why wasn't she believed?"

That single shift changes where accountability sits. It stops treating a survivor's choices as the mystery to be solved, and starts treating the response around her — the culture that doubted her, the institution that dismissed her, the system that made leaving more dangerous than staying — as the actual subject worth examining.

I've watched this reframe resonate with people in a way I didn't fully expect when I first wrote about it. Readers have told me it named something they'd felt but never quite articulated. Others have pushed back, understandably, wanting to make sure male victims and mixed realities aren't erased from the conversation — and that pushback has sharpened my thinking rather than derailed it. The truest version of this argument isn't "only women suffer disbelief." It's that disbelief itself, wherever it lands, is manufactured by the same underlying pattern: a system that only takes violence seriously when it looks a certain way, happens to a certain kind of person, or fits a story we're already comfortable telling.

What I've learned, doing this work in public, is that structural change starts small and often invisibly in a single comment section, a single reframed question, a single reader who walks away thinking about accountability slightly differently than they did five minutes earlier. I don't think one newsletter or one LinkedIn post rebuilds a justice system. But I do think the questions we normalise asking eventually shape the systems we build. If enough people stop asking survivors to explain themselves and start asking why our institutions failed to believe them, something in the architecture underneath actually starts to shift.

That's the work I keep showing up for not because I believe it's simple, but because I no longer believe it's inevitable.