A recent viral video recording of a husband berating his wife has pushed South Africans into a familiar argument. Who recorded it? Who leaked it? Whose reputation has been harmed? We talk about privacy, marriage, culture and status.
The harder question is what the moment reveals about the cruelty many women are expected to absorb quietly.
That question is bigger than one household. It asks why verbal and emotional abuse is so often softened, excused or renamed until it becomes physical, until there are bruises, police dockets, hospital records or funerals. The social lesson is brutal: harm only counts once others can see it.
Frontline gender-based violence (GBV) work shows something the public rarely sees: many women seek help long after the first harm. Before a docket, a protection order or a visible injury, there are often months or years of being corrected, mocked, threatened, isolated and made small.
Women are not passive in this period. They reason, delay, plan, protect children, test whether relatives will help, and measure when speaking will make them safer rather than place them in more danger. What outsiders call silence is often strategy.
Emotional abuse is domestic violence. The Domestic Violence Act names emotional, verbal and psychological abuse as forms of domestic violence in their own right and gives legal language to harm that families often rename as “conflict”, “disrespect” or “marital difficulty”.
The 2021 amendments also brought coercive and controlling behaviour into the legal frame. Parliament has already recognised that abuse can be a pattern of domination, not only an assault.
Emotional abuse is often missed because it does not always look like what the public has been taught to call violence. It may appear as constant criticism, insults, threats, ridicule, isolation from family and friends, control over movement, phone monitoring, financial control, threats involving children, or a home in which one person must constantly read another person’s mood to remain safe.
Community responses often protect the abuse. “All couples fight.” “That is how he speaks.” “She must not provoke him.” “At least he did not hit her.” These phrases shift responsibility onto the woman and ask her to manage the abuser’s conduct, the family’s image and the community’s discomfort at the same time.
Status deepens the problem. The more public authority a man carries, the more people may recast his cruelty as pressure, temperament, tradition or misunderstanding. The woman is then asked to carry discretion as if it were a duty, while her conduct is treated as a complication to be managed rather than harm to be stopped.
The law gives tools, not guarantees. A person experiencing domestic violence may apply for a protection order at a magistrate’s court. A bruise is not required. The process is free.
But a protection order is not the same as safety. Women still need police who respond, courts that move with urgency, families that do not send them back, and services that understand emotional abuse as harm rather than drama.
Families, neighbours, colleagues and faith communities should stop asking women to endure humiliation for peace. A home is not peaceful because one person has learnt to disappear inside it.
The better response is practical and careful: listen without blame, check in privately, ask what support would be useful, and do not protect a reputation at the cost of someone’s dignity and safety.
Respect cannot require a woman to absorb contempt. Authority, whether cultural, financial, religious or social, cannot shield cruelty. A society that claims to oppose GBV cannot ignore the conduct that often precedes physical violence.
The demand for visible injury protects abuse. It tells women that fear is not credible until it has left a mark on the body. The test is whether our homes, communities and institutions will recognise non-physical harm before it becomes harder to deny.
Words used to degrade, control and frighten are warnings. We should hear them before it is too late.
If you need help
If you are trying to understand what is happening or helping someone who is, these services may assist:
GBV Command Centre: 0800-428-428; Please Call Me: *120*7867#; SMS “help” to 31531 for persons with disabilities.
TEARS Foundation: 08000-TEARS / 08000-83277; Support Locator: *134*7355#; email: info@tears.co.za; office: 010-590-5920.
Lawyers against Abuse (LvA): 072-031-1840; email: info@lva.org.za.
MOSAIC Training Service & Healing Centre: 021-761-7585; email: admin@mosaic.org.za.
- Mosese is an attorney, accredited mediator and LLD candidate at the University of Pretoria.
Sowetan
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