Her Strength, Silence. Our Responsibility to Ensure Silence No Longer an Option

Her Strength, Silence. Our Responsibility to Ensure Silence No Longer an Option

Jun 22 , 2026. By Tedros Alemu ( Tedros Alemu ( tedisa1604@gmail.com) is a documentation officer, project manager, and protection advocate at Hiwyet Charity Association (HCA). )

The world counts the dead in wars. Harder to count are the quiet survivors whose lives are changed forever in ways that never reach a statistic. Gender-based violence was used systematically in conflicts to terrorise, control and humiliate. Survivors of these crimes often stay silent, hidden not by geography but by shame, fear and the absence of any safe place to speak.

The two-year war in northern Ethiopia, beginning in 2020, killed combatants, displaced millions and left a quieter wound largely undocumented. Multiple investigations have documented conflict-related sexual violence.

A woman's story traces the silence from its beginning. In 2023, her account emerged from displacement, loss and survival shaped by love for a child.

She was part of a family of four, a mother and father raising two children, aged 19 and 16. Before the fighting, they shared ordinary plans, schooling for the children, stability, a future built on effort rather than fear. Like many families in the region, those plans dissolved as insecurity deepened.

When staying became unbearable, they decided to leave Humera for Meqelle in search of safety. The journey was not planned. It was rushed and uncertain, and along the way, the family was pulled apart by circumstance.

The father joined the armed group later identified as the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF), acting on a belief common among men in wartime that protecting one's people is the only way to protect one's family. The mother went on with the children, carrying their few belongings and the heavier task of keeping them alive.

Their eldest son, 19, insisted on going ahead. He believed reaching Meqelle first would help. He travelled alone, arrived safely, and then waited for the others. For the mother and her 16-year-old, the road was slower and more dangerous. Hunger, exhaustion and fear wore them down until her body could no longer keep pace. Vulnerability found her there.

They met armed men, Eritrean soldiers, and the threat was immediate. When her child's life was placed in danger, she had no time to think or resist, only to act. She begged. Pleaded. And offered everything she had. To save her child, she endured repeated sexual violence over several days. It was not a sacrifice she chose but a violence forced on her in a place where power and humanity had collapsed.

She survived by holding to one hope. If she endured, her child would live.

That a mother's body became the only shield available to her child is not an isolated cruelty. Gender-based violence in conflict rarely ends with the act itself. It continues through displacement, loss and stigma, and through the absence of any confidential system designed to help.

When the ordeal ended, the two continued. They reached Meqelle not as arrivals but as survivors, registering at an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) centre alongside thousands of others. The site offered shelter, not healing.

Like many survivors, the mother chose silence. She did not report what happened or seek help. Silence felt safer than exposure. Shame, fear of stigma and fear that her family would break apart kept her quiet.

However, the silence was not freely chosen but imposed by shame, cultural norms and the lack of any trustworthy place to turn. In a displacement setting, where survivors have already lost their homes, hiding trauma becomes a second injury.

Months later, when TDF forces reached Meqelle, her husband arrived at the centre, and the family reunited. From the outside, it looked like hope. Inside, the mother held a secret she believed would destroy everything if it surfaced. Then tragedy returned.

Word came that their eldest son had died in Libya while trying to migrate in search of opportunity. The loss broke the family. For the mother, grief settled on top of an unspoken wound. She mourned a child she could not bury. His death unearthed another layer of the war's cost.

Families torn apart push their young to take deadly risks for the chance of a better life. She had fought to keep him alive, then learned he had died far from home.

Life in displacement stayed harsh, with poverty, overcrowding, and unresolved trauma. The younger child, who had witnessed extreme fear at 16, struggled, and over time, that pain turned outward. He began demanding money from his mother and threatened to tell his father what had happened if she refused.

This was violence of another kind, enveloped in emotion and silence. The mother was trapped again, not by armed men but by fear and guilt. What had once saved her child became a burden she carried alone. Her son’s behaviour was not a moral failure but a predictable result of unhealed trauma in narrow circumstances. Rather than the stability he needed, he had learned to use knowledge as a weapon.

Her experience also revealed a difficult truth about humanitarian response. Survivors often remain invisible not because they need no help, but because seeking it feels dangerous. Many survivors in conflict-affected Ethiopia fear that reporting will leave them labelled, rejected by their families or blamed for what was done to them. Those fears are not imagined. They rest on what has happened to other survivors and on documented stigma within communities.

Confidential reporting, mental health and psychosocial support, and community awareness are not optional add-ons but basic protection. Survivors need spaces where they are believed, their dignity is upheld, and disclosure does not bring punishment or rejection.

The current system often fails on every count, making survivor-centred approaches all the more important.

In practice, that means putting a survivor's safety and agency at the centre of every decision, guaranteeing confidentiality, and offering trauma-informed care in trusted locations with appropriate providers. It means supporting survivors' economic independence, engaging families and communities to shift attitudes away from blame, and building justice systems that survivors can actually reach.

The obligations run in several directions. Governments can enact and enforce laws that criminalise sexual violence in conflict, fund services, and train police, health workers and aid staff to respond.

Humanitarian organisations can build prevention and response into all their programs rather than treating it as a side service, hire and support local women and survivors as decision-makers, and secure confidential ways to report. Communities and faith leaders can challenge the narratives that blame survivors and excuse perpetrators, and make room for survivors to heal without fear of rejection.

The mother did not survive because she was strong beyond breaking. She survived because she had no other option. Her body became a shield, as her silence was a strategy. Her story stands for thousands of women whose pain stays hidden behind talk of resilience that rarely asks why survival had to cost so much.

Publishing an account like hers should not be viewed as recounting suffering. It is about responsibility, a reminder to governments, donors, aid agencies and communities that protection is as urgent as food and shelter, and that healing requires listening.

Every survivor of conflict-related gender-based violence in Ethiopia deserves a safe place to disclose, long-term support, the means to rebuild, accountability for those who harmed them, and the restoration of dignity. They deserve a future in which silence is a choice, not a necessity.

PUBLISHED ON Jun 22,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1364]