Gambiaj.com – (ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia) – Psychotherapist and global gender-rights advocate Leila Hussein has cautioned that gender-based violence continues to be normalised across societies because it is too often framed as “culture” or “tradition,” allowing crimes against girls to be excused rather than confronted.
Hussein, who serves as Global Advocacy Director for The Girl Generation, said society’s long-standing control over girls’ and women’s bodies is reinforced when abuse is culturally justified. “This violence happens because you are a girl. You are targeted because of your gender. That is the definition of gender-based violence,” she stressed.
She also criticized international media for disproportionately highlighting abuses against African girls while underreporting similar violations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This imbalance, she argued, fuels the false perception that violence is primarily an African problem.
“Our pain is seen as normal. That is why stories of African girls being violated are more widely reported,” she said. Hussein added that survivors from white and Asian communities often face barriers in sharing their stories because media producers fear their experiences might “confuse the audience,” a position she described as evidence of racial bias in global reporting.
Hussein warned that presenting crimes such as forced harm, abductions, or physical violations as cultural practices encourages impunity and strips urgency from efforts to protect victims.
“You cannot negotiate with a crime. Violence against girls is still treated as a cultural debate because society believes women’s bodies should be controlled,” she said.
She noted that even when children are taken against their will to be harmed, such cases are rarely labeled as kidnapping or abuse. “No one speaks about the kidnapping of girls to be violated. That is gender-based violence, but it is not framed that way,” she added.
The psychotherapist warned that silence and misclassification allow perpetrators to continue abusing girls without accountability. The lack of reliable data, she added, further hides the full scale of the problem, leaving many survivors uncounted and without access to support services.
Hussein urged journalists, particularly African reporters, to reshape how they document abuses against girls, calling for harmful practices to be reported as crimes rather than tradition.
“Any violence targeting girls because they were born female must be reported as gender-based violence. We need to stop negotiating with crimes committed against girls,” she emphasized.
She concluded by calling on governments, communities, and the media to challenge harmful norms and recognize that protecting girls begins with accurately naming violence for what it is: a criminal act, not a cultural practice.
