Sun, 01 Nov 2026 Feature Article

No More Silence: Why We Must End Online and Offline Violence Against Women Now.

In about twenty-four days, the world will turn orange.

On 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, a global campaign begins. It runs for sixteen days and ends on 10 December, Human Rights Day. The 2026 UNiTE campaign carries a theme that every one of us should read twice:

"Ensure justice, protect survivors, end impunity."

Justice. Protection. Accountability. Those are not slogans. They are the minimum we owe every woman and girl alive.

The Violence We Know and the Violence We Pretend Not to See

Let me start with the numbers, because numbers do not flatter anyone.

The World Health Organization estimates that nearly one in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. Roughly every ten minutes, somewhere in the world, a woman or girl is killed, and most often by someone she knows. A partner. A husband. A relative.

That is not a crime committed by strangers in dark alleys. It happens in homes, and sometimes in the very houses we call safe.

Now add what has changed in our generation. The violence has moved onto our phones.

A woman posts a picture and receives a flood of threats. A girl trusts a boyfriend with a private photo, and it ends up in a WhatsApp group of strangers. A female journalist, politician, or student speaks her mind, and a mob of anonymous accounts tells her to be quiet, or tells her what they will do to her. Studies from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a large majority of women online have either experienced or witnessed digital violence. Many of them then delete their accounts, stop speaking, and shrink themselves.

This is the point many people miss. Online violence and offline violence are not two separate problems. They are one problem wearing two faces. The abuse that begins as a comment can end as stalking. The threat typed on a screen can become a fist at the door. And the silence it forces onto women online is a silence that costs all of society.

Why This Is Personal to Us in Ghana

Some people say these are "foreign issues" and that our own culture handles such matters at home. I respect our culture. I am proud of it. But I will not allow culture to be used as a blanket to cover violence.

We grew up hearing phrases that quietly protect abusers.

"That is a family matter."
"Marriage is about endurance."
"What will people say?"
"Don't go and disgrace him."
Behind these sentences are women who suffered quietly because the community taught them that speaking out was the greater sin.

Ghana is not without tools. The Domestic Violence Act, 2007 (Act 732) exists. The Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038) exists. We have the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service, and civil society organisations that work tirelessly. But a law that is not enforced is only paper. A hotline that survivors do not trust is only a number. And an institution that treats a complaint as a joke has already failed the woman standing in front of it.

That is what the word impunity means. It means the offender walks free while the survivor is left to carry the shame.

The Argument I Must Take Seriously

Some readers will say: "Chief, men are also abused. Why does the campaign focus on women?"

It is a fair question, and I will answer it honestly.

Yes, men and boys can be victims of violence, and they deserve support and dignity too. No serious human rights defender denies this. But the campaign focuses on women and girls because the data shows that gender-based violence falls most heavily on them, and that it is driven by unequal power, old attitudes, and weak systems of protection.

Naming a problem accurately is not an attack on anyone. A doctor who treats the patient with the highest fever first is not hating the other patients.

Others will say: "People should simply stay offline if they cannot take the abuse."

That is exactly backwards.
We do not tell victims of armed robbery to stop walking on the road. The responsibility lies with the one who commits the harm, not the one who suffers it. A society that asks women to disappear from public life so that men can behave badly is not a safe society. It is a surrendered one.

What the UNiTE Campaign Asks Us to Do

I did not write this column only to describe a problem. A problem described and left alone is just a sad story.

Between 25 November and 10 December, I am calling on every reader, whether in Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, London, Toronto, Hamburg, or New York, to do something real.

1. Wear orange and say why.

Orange is the colour of the campaign. It stands for a brighter future free from violence. Wear it on 25 November and the days that follow. Post it with a clear message, not just a photo. Use the hashtags #16DaysOfActivism and #UNiTE and tag your network.

2. Break the silence in your own circle.

Speak to your family, your church, your mosque, your WhatsApp groups, and your friends. Challenge the joke that makes violence look funny. Correct the uncle who says "she provoked him." Culture changes when ordinary people stop agreeing with the harmful parts of it.

3. Men, step forward.

This must not become a conversation where women speak and men look away. Fathers, brothers, pastors, lecturers, footballers, content creators: your voice carries weight with other men that no one else's does. Be the man who says, "That is not strength, that is cowardice."

4. Protect women online.

Do not share private images of anyone. Report abusive accounts. Do not join the pile-on. When a woman is harassed online, send her a message of support, because the abuser wants her to feel alone.

5. Know where to report.

Learn how DOVVSU works in your area. Share the contacts of trusted support organisations in your community. Encourage survivors to seek help, and stand with them when they do.

6. Hold leaders to account.

Ask your Assembly Member, your MP, and your institutions what they are doing about funding for shelters, trained officers, fast court processes, and digital safety. Ask in public. Leaders respond to attention.

7. Support survivors with respect.

Believe them. Do not interrogate. Do not gossip. Do not ask, "Why did you stay?" when the real question is "Why did he do it?"

A Word From Me to You

I am a young man of twenty-one. I am a student, a writer, and a human rights volunteer with the United Nations, and a member of Amnesty International. I am not writing this from a high chair. I am writing as someone who believes that my generation will either inherit this silence or end it.

When I think of people like Malala Yousafzai, who was shot at fifteen for demanding that girls be allowed to learn and who became the youngest Nobel laureate at seventeen, I do not see people who were born powerful. I see people who refused to be quiet at the moment quiet was demanded of them.

When I think of Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in prison and still chose to build a nation, I see that real power is not noise. It is courage that stays when it is difficult.

That is the kind of power I want, and I believe it is available to anyone who decides to use their voice for someone who cannot use theirs.

So here is my ask.
Do not wait for 25 November to feel ready. Start this week. Talk to someone. Share this article. Put the orange in your profile picture early.

Because a woman is waiting for someone to believe her.

And the question is simple:
Will it be you?
Let us ensure justice. Let us protect survivors. Let us end impunity.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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