Earlier this year, the Rwanda Investigation Board (RIB) reported that they had received 4,330 cases of child sexual abuse in 2025. This figure came as an addition to an already chilling body of statistics.

The 2015-2016 Rwanda Violence Against Children and Youth Survey found that 24% of young women and 10% of young men had experienced sexual abuse before the age of 18. Meanwhile, the 2019–20 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey uncovered that nearly one in four women aged 15 to 49 had been subjected to sexual violence. Among ever-married women, almost half had endured domestic abuse, with 15% reporting episodes of sexual assault at the hands of their spouse.

These numbers raise a difficult question: Why does sexual violence persist in spite of continuous efforts to curb it?

Misplaced blame

A common technique that perpetrators of sexual violence use to evade personal accountability is to shift the blame onto their victims. "It was what she was wearing,” they say. "She led me on,” they argue. "She must have enjoyed it,” they insist.

But the thinking that the perpetrator was merely a passive actor responding to an irresistible temptation is extremely flawed. As demonstrated by the aforementioned statistics, children often feature among the victims of sexual violence. In fact, child defilement ranks among the ten most commonly recorded crimes in Rwanda.

What could an eight or even three-year-old possibly wear that would tempt an adult? Yet, in 2020, of the 4,265 cases of child defilement reported by RIB, more than one in three were children under the age of 10, with girls accounting for 98% of all victims.

And suppose, for a moment, we accepted that these perpetrators were otherwise angels who simply fell prey to the temptations of their "cunning” victims. What would we be saying about men, who sadly are often the perpetrators of sexual abuse?

That they have so little self-control such that regardless of someone’s age, vulnerability or ability to consent, they simply cannot help themselves? Are we so afraid to hold perpetrators of sexual abuse accountable that we would rather render an entire gender as lacking in self-control, basic humanity, and compassion?

Sexual abuse is not an involuntary response to someone else’s actions. It is an intentional decision to use one’s power to dominate, violate, and humiliate another human being.

Normalisation of silence

We all know of far too many cases where a child was abused by a relative, a student by a teacher, a choir member by a religious leader, or an employee by their employer. Yet those around them remained silent as they feared that speaking up would break a family, trigger retaliatory actions or tarnish an institution’s name.

But the consequences of such silence are far grimmer. It fosters an environment whereby victims of sexual violence come to believe that this is something to be endured, hidden or simply accepted as a part of life. Research shows that, in Rwanda, 44.3% of girls and 67.4% of boys who have experienced sexual violence have never told anyone.

Even more disturbing is the fact that among girls who did not report the abuse, the most commonly cited reason was that they did not think what had happened was a problem. Sexual abuse feeds on silence. Silence does not protect families, churches, schools or communities. It protects perpetrators.

An appeal

Just as the normalisation of silence is learned, so too can a culture of safety and protection be cultivated.

To those entrusted with the responsibility of teaching, parenting and nurturing future generations, may you raise men who see women as fellow human beings, and not objects of their sexual desires – men who will protect their wives, daughters, sisters, friends, employees and church members.

To the women who have become accustomed to remaining silent, may you speak out against abuse, exploitation, harassment and violence, even when it goes against the popular culture.

And to the victims of sexual abuse, we know that it was not your fault. You are not the problem. You deserve justice.

As a society, we must commit to do whatever it takes to break this vicious cycle.

The writer is a Rhodes Scholar and a PhD student in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Global Epilepsy.