Teaching puts me close to this question more than most jobs would. Every day I stand in front of kids wearing the same uniform, same colours, everything the same and still, some of them carry pain that started long before they walked into my classroom. Their clothes had nothing to do with it. Whatever went wrong started in the person who hurt them, not in a school dress or a pair of shorts.
That's really the whole point for me. Picture a small child in shorts, or a ten-year old in her school uniform. No one looks at that and sees any kind of "message." There's nothing to see. Nothing sexy or wrong about play clothes or a school dress. Yet kids still get hurt, girls and boys both. Of all people, kids should be safe from this if clothes were really the reason. They're not. So the outfit was never really the problem.
Look past Nigeria, even past this continent, and it's still the same story. Some cultures wear very little by Western standards, and abuse isn't higher there because of it. Look the other way, some of the most covered-up, strict societies deal with the exact same problems. Clothes just don't change anything, no matter where you go.
But something else has bothered me since I was small. Girls grow up hearing "cover up," "dress well", like an outfit is some kind of shield against bad people. Boys barely hear any of that. And boys get hurt too. If clothes really decided who becomes a target, that warning would go both ways. It doesn't. Which tells you this was never really about safety, it was about deciding ahead of time whose fault it would be. None of this really surprises me once you look at it plainly. A blouse can't plan anything. Jeans don't have thoughts. Only people do, and someone already set on hurting others will find a reason in anything at all: a smile, a greeting, a school uniform, a hijab. The clothes are just the excuse made up after, once the blame needs somewhere easy to land.
So maybe the better questions aren't about clothes at all. What are we really teaching boys to see people, or to see targets? Why do girls keep hearing "cover up, make yourself smaller," while boys hear almost nothing about respect? Why does "what was she wearing" always come before "why did he think that was okay"?
Minds cause harm. Clothes never have. Kids prove that better than any argument could, they never had an outfit to blame in the first place.
Image is ai generated.
This is my take on this week prompt From
