I once sat in a room and helped a man build a cage for his wife. I did not lift a hammer. I did not twist a wire. I simply listened. A friend, a man I respected, dissected his wife’s character over a low table. He listed her flaws as if reading a defective inventory. He critiqued her failures, her tone of voice, the very space she occupied in his world. We called it venting. We called it a private moment among men. We nodded. We offered him more tea. We changed the subject.  

What do we choose to protect when we call a violent man ‘good’? The phrase echoes in the aftermath, a haunting refrain that isolates survivors and shields perpetrators. We hear it from neighbours, from relatives, even from our own conflicted minds. “But he was such a good man.” This myth of the dual identity is not a nuance. It is a lie. It is one of the most pervasive and dangerous obstacles to ending gender-based violence. It is the social alibi that lets cruelty walk free.

What does justice look like when the verdict is delivered, but the woman is still broken? The current system often fails survivors of gender-based violence. The formal, colonial-era court process can be a retraumatising labyrinth. It is alienating, slow, and focused overwhelmingly on a single question. That question is not “How is she?” It is “How do we punish him?” In this punitive model, the survivor becomes a witness for the state. Her needs are secondary to the legal proc