Inherited Prejudice - By Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

Written By: Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

Category: Essay

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the poignant essay "Inherited Prejudice," Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur contributes to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 with a compelling exploration of societal attitudes towards gender-based violence. This essay, part of the Essay category, delves into the often overlooked questions surrounding victim-blaming and accountability. Kowlessur's work challenges readers to reconsider deeply ingrained cultural norms and the misplaced responsibilities assigned to women in the context of their safety.

About the Work

"Inherited Prejudice" addresses the pervasive issue of victim-blaming through a thoughtful examination of societal expectations and the narratives surrounding women's safety. The essay employs a clear and incisive style to unravel the complexity of cultural teachings that emphasize vigilance over accountability. Kowlessur effectively uses imagery and rhetorical questions to highlight the paradox of societal norms that prioritize caution for potential victims rather than addressing the root causes of violence.

Inherited Prejudice

Original Submission by Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

Inherited Prejudice

There is something revealing about the questions a society asks after a woman has been raped.

Where was she? Whom was she with? What was she wearing? Did she know him? Had she been drinking? Did she resist? Could she have left sooner?

We reconstruct her decisions with an almost forensic devotion, examining each movement, each omission, each circumstance, as though somewhere within the architecture of her choices lies an explanation for the violence itself.

As though, if we look closely enough, we might find the moment at which she could have made a different choice.

But rape is not fundamentally a failure of female caution. It is a failure of another person’s restraint, judgement, and recognition of another human being’s autonomy.

The fact that we so often begin elsewhere is not merely an unfortunate habit of language. It reveals something more deeply rooted: where we have learned to place responsibility.

We have constructed an elaborate education around the prevention of women’s victimhood.

Girls learn, often long before they are old enough to understand the lesson, that the world demands vigilance from them. They learn that certain streets become dangerous after dark, that certain situations should be abandoned before they turn threatening, that certain people should not be trusted too easily, that safety depends upon anticipating what another person might do.

The lessons rarely arrive as ideology. They arrive as care.

Be careful.

Text me when you get home.

Don’t walk there alone.

Watch your drink.

Call me if anything feels wrong.

Each instruction seems small. Each one is understandable. But together they compose something larger: an education in anticipation. A girl learns, before she has even been given the freedom to inhabit the world without fear, that her safety depends partly upon predicting the behaviour of someone else.

Eventually, these precautions become so ordinary that they disappear into instinct.

A woman learns to calculate the world around her without necessarily noticing that she is doing it.

Which road is safer?

Who is walking behind her?

How late is too late?

How much trust is too much?

There is something politically significant about that calculation.

A danger does not need to occur in order to restrict freedom. Its possibility is sufficient.

When women alter their movements, choices, clothing, routines, and habits around the possibility of sexual violence, that violence has already acquired a form of power over them. It has entered their lives before it has entered their bodies.

Yet we call this prudence.

We call it awareness. Common sense. Good judgement.

We rarely call it what it reveals: a society in which one group has been taught to organise itself around the possible misconduct of another.

And therein lies the contradiction.

We have become remarkably comfortable asking potential victims how they might have prevented violence, while treating the prevention of violence by those capable of committing it as almost self-evident.

The first question produces instructions.

The second demands accountability.

One teaches women to navigate danger.

The other asks why the danger exists.

The first is easier because it offers us the comforting illusion of control. If safety can be reduced to enough caution, enough awareness, enough foresight, then violence becomes something that can supposedly be avoided through correct behaviour.

The formula is seductive:

Wear the right thing.

Take the right route.

Leave early enough.

Do not drink too much.

Do not trust too easily.

The list can always grow, because the illusion requires it to.

But no woman can anticipate every act another person might choose to commit. No amount of vigilance can compensate for someone else’s decision to disregard a boundary.

And when that decision becomes rape, we too often continue looking backwards, searching the victim’s behaviour for the moment that might have changed the outcome.

We search for the missed warning.

The wrong turn.

The unanswered instinct.

The door she should have closed.

As though somewhere in her past there must be an explanation for what was done to her.

This is where the idea of the “perfect victim” begins to take hold.

We seem to want her to have exercised impeccable judgement before the violence, resisted unmistakably during it, and remembered everything coherently afterwards.

Her fear must be legible.

Her memory must be orderly.

Her behaviour must conform to our expectations of what terror is supposed to look like.

Her story must fit comfortably within those expectations before we grant it the certainty with which we grant other forms of wrongdoing.

But terror is not orderly.

Fear does not produce a universal choreography of survival.

Some people fight.

Some flee.

Some freeze.

Some comply because, in the unbearable logic of the moment, compliance feels safer than resistance.

The body does not consult an audience before deciding how to survive.

Nor should survival have to resemble a performance of resistance before violence becomes violence.

A person in terror owes no spectator the correct reaction.

This matters because the language we use afterwards is never neutral.

When we ask why she stayed, why she trusted him, why she did not fight, we are not merely gathering details. We are deciding, consciously or otherwise, whose choices deserve scrutiny.

The questions themselves become a means of redistributing responsibility until the person who was harmed is made to account for the circumstances in which someone else chose to harm her.

And that is the deeper problem.

We have mistaken vulnerability for responsibility.

A woman may have been careless, trusting, intoxicated, frightened, confused, or simply human.

None of these qualities confer upon another person the right to violate her.

Her imperfection does not create an entitlement in someone else.

Yet our cultural imagination has spent an extraordinary amount of time constructing the conditions under which a woman might avoid becoming a victim, while devoting comparatively less attention to the conditions under which someone learns to believe that another person’s refusal can be negotiated, ignored, or overcome.

We have become experts at teaching women where danger might be.

We have been less willing to ask what teaches someone to become dangerous.

That imbalance does not belong solely to individual women or individual men.

When I say “we,” I do not mean that every person bears equal guilt for every act of sexual violence. I mean the wider social world in which ideas are inherited before they are questioned: families that teach caution without teaching accountability; institutions that scrutinise credibility more readily than power; communities that dismiss discomfort as awkwardness until it becomes impossible to ignore; and a culture that has become so accustomed to women’s vigilance that it scarcely recognises what that vigilance costs.

This is where prejudice becomes difficult to see.

Prejudice does not always arrive as hatred.

Sometimes it arrives as an assumption so familiar that nobody thinks to challenge it.

It lives in the expectation that a woman should have known better. That she should have been more careful. That her choices are somehow relevant to another person’s decision to violate her.

It can exist without anyone consciously deciding that women deserve less.

It only requires us to have inherited the idea that their behaviour must somehow account for what happens to them.

Culture is not only what we explicitly teach.

It is also what we repeatedly normalise.

It is what becomes so familiar that we cease to recognise it as an idea.

It is the reason a woman can know that something feels wrong and still wonder whether she is entitled to call it wrong.

It is the reason a victim may spend more time reconstructing her own mistakes than confronting the person who violated her.

It is the reason the question What did she do? Can arrive so instinctively, while Why did he believe he could? Can feel almost confrontational.

Perhaps it should.

Because that second question takes us somewhere the first never can.

It forces us to confront entitlement rather than vulnerability. It asks what happens when desire is mistaken for permission, when familiarity is mistaken for access, when persistence is mistaken for persuasion, when silence is interpreted according to the wishes of the person who wants to hear yes.

It asks us to recognise rape not as some incomprehensible rupture committed only by monsters beyond the boundaries of ordinary society, but as an act rooted in a profoundly ordinary and therefore profoundly dangerous idea:

That another person’s autonomy can, under certain circumstances, become negotiable.

That idea is what must become intolerable.

Not the existence of women who are imperfect witnesses to their own suffering.

Not the existence of fear that does not look the way we expected it to.

Not the fact that someone trusted the wrong person.

Not the fact that someone froze when we expected her to fight.

The entitlement itself.

Prevention should have begun there.

Not with teaching women to become increasingly difficult to harm, but with teaching every person that another human being’s body is never a territory to which desire grants access.

Not with an endless refinement of precautions for those who might be violated, but with a culture willing to make violation unthinkable, indefensible, and impossible to excuse.

Because a society cannot call itself safe merely because its women have become skilled at surviving its dangers.

A woman knowing which streets to avoid is not proof that those streets are safe.

A woman learning to hold her keys between her fingers is not proof that she is protected.

A woman learning to monitor the hour, the room, the drink, the footsteps behind her is not evidence of freedom.

That is not safety.

That is adaptation.

And there is something profoundly cruel about demanding that the potential victim become an expert in surviving a danger she did not create.

We should not measure a woman’s safety by how successfully she has learned to anticipate someone else’s violence.

We should measure our society by how fiercely it rejects the entitlement that makes that violence possible.

Because the goal should never be to teach women how to become harder to violate.

It should be to raise human beings who understand that another person’s autonomy is not an obstacle to overcome, a boundary to negotiate, or a refusal to outlast.

It is a boundary.

And it is enough.

Perhaps that is the question we have been avoiding all along.

Not How could she have prevented it?

But:

Why did she have to?

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious event that celebrates diverse voices in literature. This competition provides a platform for writers worldwide to showcase their work, offering a unique opportunity to engage with pressing social issues through poetry and prose. Participants from various backgrounds come together to share their perspectives, making it a vibrant and thought-provoking literary gathering.

We extend our sincere gratitude to Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur for her insightful contribution, "Inherited Prejudice," to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her essay serves as a critical reminder of the importance of examining and challenging societal norms. We thank Angelina for her courage and dedication in addressing such a vital topic, enriching the discourse surrounding gender violence and accountability.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.