There is a silence that wraps itself around certain women like a shroud—thick, suffocating, strategic. It’s the silence reserved for women who are p
There is a silence that wraps itself around certain women like a shroud—thick, suffocating, strategic.
It’s the silence reserved for women who are poor, prostituted, racialized, addicted, mentally unwell, 
undocumented, disabled, or come from families society has labeled “broken.”
These women are not seen.
Not as daughters. Not as sisters.
And certainly not as victims worthy of outrage.
Too many times, the world only shows up when the survivor fits a clean narrative—middle-class, photogenic, well-spoken, a daughter of respectability. But when the assaulted woman lives on the margins? When she’s grown up surviving more than living? That’s when the silence grows teeth.
And here’s the deeper ache: that silence is often upheld not just by institutions, but by other women. Women who have climbed just high enough to forget who’s still beneath. Women who protect men, reputations, and family names—at the cost of other women’s pain.
There is no liberation in that.
There is no sisterhood in selective empathy.
There is no justice where some women are disposable.
We must name this.
We must confront how often society, and sometimes even we, have demanded a certain kind of pain to be palatable before it’s believed.
We have asked survivors to be neat, polite, and unimpeachable. But healing is not neat. Survival is not polite. And womanhood? Womanhood is not something earned through performance—it is ours by breath, by blood, by being.
To the women discarded:
You were never meant to be buried beneath someone else’s shame.
You owe no one your silence.
Your story does not need to be softened to be heard.
We see you.
We believe you.
We will not look away.
Let us build a new kind of sisterhood—one that defends without condition, listens without judgment, and loves without apology. One that makes no woman disposable again.
AFFIRMATIONS:
I will not confuse silence with peace—truth is my practice, even when it shakes the room.
I refuse a sisterhood built on comfort—I choose one built on courage, compassion, and collective liberation.
I honor the stories of those the world tried to erase—because no woman is disposable, and no pain is invisible.
I do not protect systems that silence the wounded—I break cycles and build sanctuary.
My work for women and girls is not for show—it is for the woman with no platform, no privilege, and no one left to believe her.
