There is a particular kind of violence that never makes it into crime statistics, because it happens behind a door that families agree, without ever saying so out loud, will stay shut. It is the violence of a brother against a sister, a son against a mother, a husband against a wife violence that unfolds inside the one place a person is supposed to be safest. I know this violence. I carry bruises from it, and I carry something harder to see: the quiet, sinking understanding that even now, even after being hurt, my safety is treated as a private matter rather than a serious one. I am not writing this only about myself. I am writing it because what happened to me is not unusual. It is a pattern, and patterns are systemic. They survive because of structures of silence, of stigma, of law, and of who a family decides is worth protecting.

Daughters and sisters are frequently expected to be the shock absorbers, to keep the peace, to protect the family’s reputation, to not “make things worse” by naming what happened.

Daughters and sisters are frequently expected to be the shock absorbers, to keep the peace, to protect the family’s reputation, to not “make things worse” by naming what happened.

In many households, when a brother or son is violent, unpredictable, or has frightening behaviour, the response is not protection for the people around him; it is protection of him. If there is a mental illness involved, the family often folds the violence into the illness and stops there. “He is not well” becomes the entire explanation, and also, quietly, the........

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