Stop Looking for the Bruise. Start Looking for the Pattern.
When people think about gender-based violence, they picture a single moment.
A bruise.
A threat.
A violent incident.
Those are signs of abuse, and they are important to notice but if that's all you're watching for, you'll miss almost everything that happens before it.
When I teach our Gender-Based Violence Agency & Empowerment Workshop to corporate teams, there's one question I ask that changes how people see this issue more than anything else.
What pattern am I seeing?
Most people are trained, without realising it, to look for red flags.
One comment.
One incident.
One thing that feels off.
When that one thing isn't dramatic enough to raise an alarm, it gets filed away as nothing.
A controlling comment on its own doesn't tell you much.
Neither does someone wanting to know where their partner is all the time.
Or constant criticism of what they wear.
Any one of them could be explained away.
Control.
Isolation.
Intimidation.
Manipulation.
These behaviours work as a set, not as isolated events.
That's called coercive control.
Not a single act of violence, but a pattern designed to remove someone's independence one small decision at a time, until asking for help feels impossible instead of obvious.
Over time, that pattern chips away at someone's confidence and their sense of their own judgement.
Leaving starts to feel harder than staying, even when staying is what's costing them the most.
By the time other people can see what's going on, it's usually been happening for a long time already.
This is why the question matters more than the checklist.
"Did that one thing seem abusive?" will almost always come back with a no.
"What pattern am I seeing?" gives you something to actually work with.
Once you start looking for patterns instead of waiting for incidents, you notice things you used to miss.
A colleague who's stopped mentioning her partner.
Someone who checks their phone before answering a simple question about their evening.
A friend who used to make her own decisions and now runs everything past someone else first.
None of those things, on their own, prove anything.
Together, they're worth paying attention to.
Stop waiting for the bruise. Start looking for the pattern.
You ask better questions when you're looking for a pattern.
You respond with more understanding instead of shutting the conversation down because "it doesn't sound that bad."
And you give people room to say more, because you've already shown them you're not waiting for a bruise before you take them seriously.
If more people understood this, we'd recognise abuse sooner, have better conversations about it, and get more people support before things escalate.
This is exactly what our GBV Agency & Empowerment Workshop is built to do.
Not a list of red flags to memorise, but a shift in how people watch, listen, and respond, so the pattern gets noticed while there's still time to act on it.
If you're putting together Women's Month activities and want a workshop people are still talking about after August ends, take a look at the GBV Agency & Empowerment Workshop or get in touch and I'll talk you through it.
In your corner
Ann
Ann du Plessis is a human behaviour and performance specialist with a decade in self-defense, GBV prevention and anti-bullying work.
She holds a black belt in Goju Ryu Karate and has a background in trauma-informed coaching and post-incident debriefing.
She is also a survivor of sexual assault, emotional abuse and workplace harassment, lived experience that shapes this work as a professional lens, not a personal statement.