WHEN DOES IT END?

Enough is clearly not enough.

This will probably be the first and last time I will talk about this.

I try, as much as I can, to stay out of opining on trending issues but on this matter, I find that I am angry. And fury has a way of blurring the lines of sensibility and regular, rational boundaries. So this once, I’ll break my own rules and say my mind.

In the past few days, concerning videos have surfaced from Ozoro, Delta State. Videos that are difficult to watch and even harder to forget. In these videos, women are seen running, screaming, calling for help as groups of men gather around them -some chasing, some grabbing, some watching. This injustice is unfolding in the open, in broad daylight, with a kind of ease that is perhaps the most disturbing part of all.

They will tell you that there were warnings beforehand. Quiet instructions passed around for women to stay indoors, to avoid being seen, to make themselves scarce for their own safety.

Let’s pause here, for a moment, and consider what that means.

These instructions are not that the men should be restrained or that the violence should be prevented, but that women should disappear.

It is easier to call it culture than to call it what it is.

Because what is being defended, subtly or otherwise, is not heritage. What is being defended is the existence of a space, however unofficial, where harm against women is anticipated, normalized, and carried out with alarming confidence.

At the core of this barbaric practice is a fundamental disregard of women as people. We see women as bodies, objects to be acted upon, to be used, to be absorbed into something that demands their silence in order to survive.

What kind of culture requires the bodies of women as collateral?

What does it mean for a society to anticipate harm, to organize itself around it, and still call itself whole?

And perhaps the most unsettling question: if violence can be permitted within a specific window of time, does it begin and end there? Or does that moment simply reveal what has always existed beneath the surface, waiting for permission?

Because permission is the thing we do not talk about enough.

A designated time does not create cruelty. It does not manufacture violation. It does not implant depravity into otherwise innocent minds. What it does is remove consequence and grant permission to the exposure of a perversion that already exists.

And yet, this is a pattern we recognize.

Each time news of violence against women surfaces, there is widespread outrage. We scream in protest. We trend hashtags. We write posts heavy with grief and fury. We are promised, again and again, that this time will be different.

But nothing shifts.

The cycle continues, uninterrupted and unthreatened, because outrage, no matter how loud, has proven itself insufficient in the face of a system that does not see women as people.

Systems that are doggedly upheld, culturally defended, and socially tolerated.

And mind you, all of this is happening in Women’s Month. A time that, earlier in the month, was filled with conferences, panels, and seminars. Rooms packed full to the brim with language about empowerment, visibility, and growth.

Give to gain was the mantra. Uplift women. Inspire them. Pour into them.

But of what use is all that performance if we are still grappling with something this basic, this brutal?

At some point, we have to be honest with ourselves: it is not the woman who needs more enlightenment. It is the perpetrator who must be restrained, confronted, and reprimanded. We do not need more carefully curated conversations if they do not translate into consequence.

We need to see the ripple effect of actions having real, debilitating consequences for harm. We need men to stop killing women. To stop violating them. To simply see them as people. As human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

Is that a hard ask?

Because it shouldn’t be.

And maybe this is where the exhaustion is coming from - the endless cycle of talking, convening, performing awareness, while the reality remains unchanged. At some poinit, the language must give way to action.

What persists in Ozoro is not an isolated horror. It is an exposure.

An exposure of how easily a society can learn to look away.
An exposure of how violence can be ritualized, anticipated, and even expected.
An exposure of how women’s bodies continue to be treated as negotiable.

And beneath it all, the same stubborn truth remains:

This cannot exist without a fundamental disregard of women as people.

Because a moment that permits violence does not create monsters, it reveals them.

Culture, at its best, is meant to preserve people, their dignity, their identity, and their continuity. It is meant to hold a community together, not fracture it along the bodies of its most vulnerable.

When a practice demands silence from its victims and protection for its perpetrators, it ceases to be custom. It becomes a system of harm that is carefully maintained and repeatedly excused. Case in point, the ever-popular concept of the patriarchy.

This is the same cycle we have seen play out again and again and again. Then they say women are angry and ‘not all men’ and other cool stories.

But in truth, we are tired of being angry.

And the question we are left with is no longer whether we are outraged.

The question is what, if anything, we are willing to change.

Because really and truly, where does it end?

Love,

Oreva.