Every August, South Africa dresses itself in purple and green. We gather for breakfast events, candlelight vigils, workshops, talk-shops, webinars and panel discussions. We speak about gender-based violence and femicide, honour women whose lives were stolen and recommit ourselves to building a safer country.

Over the years, we have learnt to talk about intimate partner violence. We have built shelters, established campaigns, hotlines, marched and said the names of the women we have lost. But we are yet to discuss an uncomfortable dimension of the gender-based violence (GBV) conversation: when the abuser is a father — when the person inflicting the harm is the one whose biological and moral duty is to protect.

On this, we fall silent.

Women’s Month has become

31 days of reflection, recommitment and conversation. Yet too often, the conversations remain comfortably familiar. We discuss the crisis without confronting one of its deepest roots. Then September arrives. And the numbers barely move.

I have sat in many of those rooms. I have listened to intelligent, compassionate people spend hours discussing GBV over coffee, leaving with the comforting sense that progress had been made. Sometimes conversation is necessary. But conversation can also become performance, allowing us to feel engaged without asking us to confront what is most uncomfortable.

South Africa’s GBV crisis does not need more conversations that stop at the surface. It needs us to confront what we have spent generations avoiding. The violence of fathers.

When I decided to write a memoir about my experience of paternal abuse, the people who love me most recoiled. Their question was gentle, even protective: Are you sure you want to write about something so personal? I have thought about that question often. Because what it asks is: Are you sure you want to say this out loud? Are you sure you want to take something the family and society have agreed to keep hidden and place it where everyone can see it?

I was sure. I still am. Unlike the many years before when I started writing and then stopped, this time I am very sure because that instinct — that gentle, well-meaning pressure to protect the family’s silence — is what allows abuse to survive.

What gives me hope is that, globally, something is changing. Not in conference rooms but on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Young women are doing what their mothers and grandmothers often could not: speaking publicly about what happened inside their homes. They are not describing violence by strangers. They are describing the violence of fathers. Millions watch.

The comment sections fill with the same refrain: “I thought I was the only one. I have never said this out loud before.” This is not content creation. It is collective truth-telling. Armed with the language of trauma, therapy and shared experience, the women are rejecting the myths that kept previous generations silent. They are saying: “This was not discipline. This was not normal. This was not love.” South Africa needs to catch up. Our culture protects fathers. Across communities and generations, fatherhood is wrapped in ideas of authority, provision and unquestionable respect. What happens inside his home is treated as his business. The beliefs do not merely excuse abuse — they enable it. I know because I grew up inside them.

Paternal abuse is difficult to expose because it hides in plain sight. The man who terrifies his children behind closed doors can be admired by neighbours, respected by colleagues and celebrated by his community. People see enough to suspect the truth but not enough to name it — and are too uncomfortable

to intervene because of the shame.

The silence and harm does not end with childhood. It settles into the bodies of the children who survive it. It shapes their relationships, their sense of safety, their mental health and often the lives they build long after they have escaped those homes.

This Women’s Month, I want us to consider something else that the national conversations around GBV rarely do. Not only the headline cases. Not only the women who end up in hospital or whose names we mourn after they are gone. I want us to confront the everyday violence that rarely makes the news: the father whose moods dictate the atmosphere of the home; the father whose children learn to read his footsteps before they hear his voice.

Those children are sitting in classrooms. They are in our families. Some of them now are adults.

A generation of young women has decided that silence is no longer an inheritance worth keeping. They are telling the truth about the fathers who harmed them. Millions are listening. South Africa must be prepared to do the same because we cannot end GBV while refusing to confront what happens inside our own homes.

The father wound we refuse to name is the silence we continue to pass from one generation to the next. The silence has protected the wrong people for long enough.

Cassandra Gudlhuza is a former journalist and columnist. Her debut memoir, Unfathered: Surviving Paternal Brutality to a Life Reclaimed and Unshamed, examines the lifelong impact of paternal abuse and the power of breaking inherited silence.