One day, when I was 13 years old, I had a visit planned with a friend in my neighborhood in Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi. They lived about a 10-minute walk away from my family’s house. My parents almost always drove my siblings and I between our homes and our friends’ homes back then, no matter how close or far, but they must have been out that afternoon, and my friend and I had already made our plans.

I believed—with good reason—that I needed to ensure as best as I could that I wouldn’t be a target on that short walk. I’d had to quit one of my extracurricular activities the year prior, after being harassed by one of the male grounds staff at the activity site. I had been 12 at the time, so I knew that my age wouldn’t be a deterrent. Before leaving my house that afternoon, I dressed as androgynously as I could: baggy jeans, baggy shirt, big jacket even though it was midday in summer, a baseball cap—facing forward so as to hide my face—and high-top basketball sneakers. To onlookers along my route I must have looked ridiculous, but it was what I thought I had to do to keep myself protected against sexualized attention.

Last October, an 11-year-old girl doing the same thing as I was that day—walking from her home to the home of someone she knew, in her case an aunt—was raped en route to her aunt’s home by a man who pretended to merely be offering her a ride on his bicycle. Since then, the case has become the central narrative of Malawi’s #MeToo moment, the latest in our ongoing fight against gender-based violence. She is far from the only girl child whose victimization has made public headlines, though: the month before, the mother of a 14-year-old girl who had been sent to live with one of her uncles filed a police report alleging that the girl had been the victim of repeated rape at the hands of her uncle over the course of several months. Last November, another girl, this one 12 years old, was raped by an employee at her grandmother’s home.

Almost a quarter century on, the fears I had held at 13—fears that I would become the victim of sexual violence, even at my young age—stand, brutally, just as correct.