SHE CAME TO STUDY. HER OWN ROOM BECAME HER BiGGEST FEAR..

What do you do when the place you came to build your future becomes the place you are most afraid to close your eyes?

That is not a question I am asking lightly. Because for some female students at a certain university in my country Zambia, every night has become something to dread rather than something to rest in.

Some of these young women have been raped and robbed not somewhere far and unmonitored but inside their own campus hostels and in boarding houses surrounding the university. In the rooms they sleep in, study in, and cry in when they miss home. These are not rumours whispered between students. These are real attacks, happening repeatedly, to real young women who came to this university carrying nothing but hope and a hunger to learn.

And when they could carry it no longer, they did something remarkable. They walked out. Together. Two days in a row they took to the streets tired, hurting, but refusing to be invisible any longer. There is something that breaks your heart and fills it with pride at the same time when you see women who have been through that kind of pain still choosing to stand up and fight.

Being a student myself, this story settled in my chest in a way I could not shake. Because I know what it means to live away from home, to trust that your little room is your sanctuary. These women trusted that too. And that trust was stolen from them in the worst possible way.

I am sharing this on World Pulse because this community has always been a place where women's pain is not minimised and women's voices are not silenced. So I want to ask you, have you or anyone you know ever experienced something like this as a female student? Have you ever felt completely unsafe in a place that was supposed to protect you?

Speak up here. Share your experience. Because every story shared is a hand stretched out to a woman somewhere who thinks she is completely alone.

And she is not. None of them are.

#EndGBV #WomenSupportingWomen #CampusSafety #WorldPulse