The Gender Scripts
Gender-based violence does not begin with a punch, a threat, or a slammed door. It begins long before adulthood. It begins in childhood, sometimes before a child can walk or talk. It begins in the subtle, repeated messages society gives boys about what strength looks like and girls about what love requires. These lessons don’t feel like lessons at the time, they feel like culture. They feel like normal life. But they shape every relationship that child will have later.
Boys are taught that emotions weaken them. They are praised for being tough, laughed at for crying, told to “man up” instead of express fear, and rewarded for dominance. Girls are taught to be nice, accommodating, agreeable, and quiet. If a boy hits a girl in primary school, adults say, “It means he likes you.” If a girl complains, she is told not to make a scene.
These early scripts normalise violence as a form of affection and endurance as a form of femininity. By the time children reach adulthood, these values are so ingrained that they feel natural, even when they are harmful. And when a society repeatedly teaches boys to ignore their emotional world and teaches girls to absorb discomfort without protest, we create adults who think gender-based violence is something that happens to “other people,” not something their own behaviour might contribute to.
Why Boys Aren’t Allowed to Feel Anything but Anger
Children come into the world capable of feeling a full spectrum of emotions, joy, sadness, fear, shame, excitement, disappointment, longing, anxiety, and tenderness. But boys quickly learn that most of these feelings are off-limits. Sadness is weakness. Fear is shameful. Vulnerability is unacceptable. The only emotion society universally permits in boys is anger.
Anger becomes their language long before they understand how to articulate hurt or confusion. When boys are overwhelmed, they lash out. When they are anxious, they become aggressive. When they feel rejected, they retaliate. Anyone who has worked with young boys knows that anger is often a mask, the one emotion they are allowed to show.
This emotional restriction becomes the foundation of gender-based violence. If a boy never learns how to express fear, disappointment, or insecurity in healthy ways, he will express them in the only way society has taught him, through control, aggression, withdrawal, manipulation, or dominance. Emotional illiteracy is not harmless, it becomes dangerous when paired with entitlement.
Boys grow into men who cannot handle rejection without exploding, who cannot navigate conflict without intimidation, and who cannot tolerate vulnerability without attacking the person who triggered it. These patterns begin in childhood, and by the time they manifest in adult relationships, society pretends to be surprised. But we trained them this way.
The Grooming of Girls Into Silence
While boys are being hardened, girls are being softened. They learn that being “difficult” makes them unlikeable. They learn to apologise when someone else is uncomfortable. They learn to prioritise keeping the peace over telling the truth. They are praised for being quiet, gentle, nurturing, and patient, even when those qualities hurt them.
Girls learn early that expressing discomfort is inconvenient. Adults lecture them for being “dramatic” or “oversensitive.” If they speak up, they are told to “be the bigger person.” If they are harassed, they are blamed for their clothing. If they are hit, they are told not to provoke boys. These messages do not teach empowerment, they teach endurance.
By the time girls reach adulthood, they have internalised the belief that male behaviour is their responsibility to manage. They tolerate disrespect because they were raised to be understanding. They excuse harmful behaviour because they were taught that love requires sacrifice. They second-guess their instincts because they were trained to prioritise other people’s comfort over their own safety.\ This grooming is not accidental, it is cultural. It sets the stage for gender-based violence long before any romantic relationship begins.
Schools as the First Battleground
Schools are often the first environments where gender-based violence becomes visible, but rarely acknowledged. Harassment, sexist jokes, bullying, coercion, and unwanted touching are common in hallways, classrooms, and playgrounds. Yet these behaviours are often dismissed as childish mischief.
When girls report harassment in school, they are often told to “ignore it.” When boys engage in it, teachers excuse it as “normal adolescent behaviour.” This dismissal teaches both genders the same lesson, that girls’ discomfort is insignificant and boys’ entitlement is expected.
Teachers and administrators frequently fail to intervene because they prioritise order over accountability. They see confronting sexism and early aggression as too disruptive. But this tolerance allows patterns to deepen. Boys who are never held accountable become men who believe they have nothing to answer for. Girls who are never protected become women who believe they deserve none.
Schools also reinforce gender divides through dress codes that police girls’ bodies and sports cultures that reward aggression and dominance in boys. These environments lay the foundation for gender inequality long before adulthood.
The Entitlement
Gender-based violence in adulthood rarely begins with physical acts. It starts with entitlement, the belief that a man has a right to a partner’s time, body, attention, compliance, or silence. Entitlement can look harmless at first, controlling who she sees, checking her phone, demanding constant availability, criticising her clothing, mocking her emotions, or making decisions without consultation. Society often normalises these behaviours as “jealousy,” “protectiveness,” or “typical male behaviour.”
But entitlement grows. And when entitlement is paired with emotional immaturity, the inability to handle fear, rejection, or disappointment, violence becomes a predictable outcome. A man who feels entitled to control his partner becomes dangerous when she pushes back. A man who believes her emotions should never inconvenience him becomes volatile when she expresses them. A man who cannot tolerate vulnerability becomes abusive when confronted with his own insecurity.
Entitlement is not a personality flaw, it is a cultural inheritance. And that inheritance shapes the behaviour of millions of men who believe they are “good partners” while engaging in controlling, manipulative, or coercive behaviour that damages the women in their lives.
How Girls Learn to Normalise Disrespect
While boys learn entitlement, girls learn tolerance. They are told to give second chances, to avoid overreacting, to “fix” hurt men, to be patient with partners who “struggle to express themselves,” and to lower their expectations to avoid seeming demanding. When a man raises his voice, girls are told he is “just stressed.” When he becomes jealous, they are told he is “just protective.” When he disrespects them, they are told they’re “too sensitive.”
Disrespect becomes rebranded as affection. Control becomes rebranded as passion. Girls learn to interpret instability as intensity, volatility as love, and unpredictability as excitement. By the time they enter serious relationships, the emotional manipulation feels familiar. They may not recognise early signs of abuse because they were taught that enduring discomfort is a marker of maturity. Girls are not walking into violent relationships blindly, they are walking into patterns they were conditioned to emotionally tolerate.
The First Relationship
Young adults often experience gender-based violence for the first time in teenage or early adult relationships. These relationships expose the cracks created in childhood. Boys test how far their control can go. Girls test how much they are willing to tolerate. Both parties reenact the scripts they learned.
A boy who was never allowed to express fear becomes a partner who turns fear into jealousy or rage. A girl who was taught to absorb discomfort becomes a partner who rationalises controlling behaviour. A boy who was rewarded for dominance becomes a partner who escalates when challenged. A girl who was taught to be accommodating becomes a partner who apologises unnecessarily to keep the peace.
These early relationships shape future patterns. If violence is normalised at 16, it becomes harder to break at 26. If silence is learned at 14, it becomes harder to unlearn at 34. And if entitlement is rewarded at 12, it becomes even more dangerous when combined with adulthood’s power, resources, and freedoms.
The Gendered Silence That Becomes Generational
Gender-based violence is intergenerational because gender scripts are intergenerational. Boys grow into men who repeat the behaviours they watched. Girls grow into women who tolerate behaviours they witnessed. Children learn not from what their parents say, but from what they endure.
A boy who sees his father yell at his mother learns that anger earns compliance.
A girl who sees her mother shrink learns that shrinking keeps you safe.
A boy who watches his mother cry learns nothing about remorse unless his father models accountability, which most abusers never do.
A girl who watches her father dominate learns that dominance is normal.
These patterns become the foundation of adult relationships. Until society confronts the ways children are socialised, gender-based violence will continue to replicate itself with frightening accuracy.
How Society Reinforces Harm
Adults often reinforce harmful gender scripts in ways they don’t even realise.
When a boy is praised for hitting puberty but a girl is shamed for it, violence is reinforced.
When a boy’s aggression is forgiven but a girl’s anger is condemned, inequality is reinforced.
When women are called dramatic but men are called passionate, bias is reinforced.
When parents laugh at sexist jokes their sons tell, misogyny is reinforced.
When families tell daughters to “be patient” but never tell sons to “be gentle,” harm is reinforced.
Gender-based violence is not created in explosive moments, it is created through thousands of micro-messages that teach men to take and women to give.
Fixing GBV Requires Changing What We Teach Children
Awareness campaigns have become a yearly ritual, hashtags, posters, marches, speeches, and public promises. They spark outrage for a week and disappear. They raise awareness but rarely change behaviour because behaviour is shaped in homes, schools, and social interactions long before adulthood.
Ending GBV requires reprogramming the scripts children inherit. It means teaching boys emotional literacy instead of emotional suppression. It means teaching girls assertiveness instead of endurance. It means creating schools that challenge, not reinforce, gender stereotypes. It means having uncomfortable conversations in homes where harmful cultural norms have been repeated for decades. It means holding boys accountable early instead of expecting women to clean up the emotional damage later. Violence is learned. So is respect. So is empathy. So is accountability. If society wants to change the outcome, it must change the training.
Breaking the Pattern Without Shaming
Gender-based violence is not about “bad men” or “weak women.” It is about cultural programming that shapes everyone. Men are not born violent, they are trained to see dominance as power. Women are not born submissive, they are trained to see self-sacrifice as love. Breaking the pattern requires confronting the system, not attacking individuals.
But confronting the system means acknowledging the ways we contribute to it. The jokes we laugh at, the comments we ignore, the stereotypes we pass on, the emotions we silence, the warnings we dismiss, these are the seeds of gender-based violence. Change begins with everyday actions, not extraordinary ones.
The Responsibility Is Collective, and It Starts With Unlearning
Gender-based violence is not a women’s issue. It is a cultural issue. A societal issue. A generational issue. And until society stops outsourcing the responsibility to victims, nothing will change.
The work begins with unlearning, unlearning harmful masculinity, unlearning female obedience, unlearning silence, unlearning endurance, unlearning the lies we inherited. It begins with teaching children that emotions are human, not gendered. It begins with holding boys to the same accountability we demand from girls. It begins with giving girls the tools to protect their boundaries instead of sacrificing them.
If gender-based violence is taught, it can be untaught. But only if society chooses discomfort over denial.
