“Shut up” is one of the blunt ways to silence someone when you don’t want them to speak anymore. “Forgive and forget” is another way, except it is done subtly, in a more repackaged, refurbished, peaceful, and seemingly mature way. Nobody is directly telling you to stop talking, but they are telling you to stop talking about what happened, stop being angry about it, stop bringing it up, and stop making everybody else uncomfortable with the consequences of what someone did to you. And you know who it is mostly for? Women.
A woman reports her husband to their religious leader. She says he hits her and she might die if the assault continues. They slap a warning on the man’s wrist, pray for him, ask him to change, and advise the woman to forgive and forget the whole issue. They sweep her feelings under the rug along with the incident, and if she refuses or threatens to leave, she is tagged as the angry woman who is wicked and ungodly. She will eventually be pressured into forgiving her husband, who will likely do it again because he knows there will be no repercussions for his actions.
Religion is one of the biggest upholders and enablers of the forgive and forget script. In 2023, researchers spoke to 20 Nigerian women who had sought help from Catholic priests and nuns after experiencing intimate partner violence and found that most of the religious leaders involved encouraged women to forgive and accept their situations, while most of these women reported being revictimised after the mediation. They hardly ever address the root cause of a woman’s misery but are so quick to ask her to forgive, as if forgiveness is the solution. They forget that forgiveness does not make an abusive person accountable and does not guarantee that the same thing will not happen again.
This does not end with religion, because the more we repeat the idea that forgiveness is the mature and godly response to being hurt, the more it begins to seep into our culture and becomes a social expectation placed on the victim.
If a man cheats, the wife is not expected to make a huge fuss out of it and is instead expected to forgive and make up because “all men cheat” and it is not a big deal. She is told that her husband’s cheating is one of those things she has to endure as a married woman. However, it would not be the same if the tables were turned. A man whose wife cheats is often given social permission to end the marriage or punish her. Everybody understands when he leaves her, and he might even be bullied if he chooses to forgive her because people will tell him he is allowing himself to be disrespected and manipulated. There is research on marriage and infidelity in Southeastern Nigeria that documented this gendered double standard. It found that married men have historically been afforded greater sexual autonomy and that male infidelity is more socially acceptable than female infidelity.
The forgive-and-forget culture is how society expects women to tolerate abuse. It dictates how long they are supposed to be angry and how quickly they are supposed to return everyone to normal. When someone does something terrible to you, nobody is going to sit you down and ask about the aftermath and what it did to your mind or your sense of safety; they just tell you to forgive and forget.
“Let the sleeping dogs lie,” they’ll say, and the moment you refuse, you become the bitter one. They move from the person who caused the harm and focus on the victim who is struggling to live with it because everybody wants the discomfort to end and forgiveness is the quickest way to make that happen.
The problem with this is that the pressure to forgive does not exist in a vacuum, especially when we consider how many women already struggle to speak about violence and seek help. According to Nigeria’s 2024 Demographic and Health Survey, 23% of women who had ever been married or had an intimate partner had experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence from their current or most recent partner, and among women who had experienced physical or sexual violence, 58% did not seek help or tell anyone about it, while 24% sought help to stop the violence. When more than half of women who experience physical or sexual violence did not seek help or tell anyone, we need to question what happens when the few who do speak are met with instructions to forgive and forget instead of being allowed to process what happened to them and decide what they need to feel safe again.
These expectations that it is a woman’s place to absorb harm and restore peace did not just appear when they became adults. In African homes, girls are taught to apologise even when they are not wrong; they are told to make peace and be the bigger person because nobody wants a girl who is always angry or difficult. They tell you to allow peace to reign, which in reality means that you should forgive and forget so everyone can be comfortable again except the victim, of course. This is how she grows to understand that keeping peace is her responsibility even when she was not the one who disrupted it in the first place.
I remember a friend who once came crying to me about how horrible and absent her parents had been throughout her life and how much she struggled as a result. And instead of the elders in her family acknowledging her pain and allowing her to be angry about what she had experienced, they told her to forgive her parents and move past the abuse because it was their first time being parents. She asked them if it was her own second time being a daughter, and the matter could not be settled as a result. This explains how we sometimes use the humanity of the person who caused the harm to erase the humanity of the person who experienced it. Yes, it may have been their first time being parents, but she was not a practice run, and she still has to grow up with whatever they got wrong.
There is a way forgiveness is presented as though it is automatically the right thing to do because we spend so much time asking if the person at fault deserves forgiveness that we forget to ask what the person who was harmed deserves and what they want to do. We need to ask if she deserves time to process what happened to her, if she deserves to be angry without being called wicked, if she deserves an apology that does not come with the expectation that she must immediately accept it, if she deserves distance from the person who hurt her, and if she deserves to decide that even if she forgives someone, she no longer wants that person to have the same access to her.
You don’t hurt people and then apologise and expect things to go back to the way they were. Asking for forgiveness does not mean forgiveness is owed. When you apologise, you hand the victim the decision to either accept your apology or walk away, and demanding that they move past it because you have apologised is you imposing on them. This can invalidate their feelings. Apologising should not make you feel entitled to acceptance, because saying sorry does not automatically restore trust or erase the memory of what happened.
It is the same instinct behind those movie scenes where the bully is forced to apologise to the person they tormented for years, and the two are pushed into a hug while everyone expects the victim to accept it and move on, as if an apology can undo what was done, but real life does not work that way. An apology acknowledges what happened without reversing it, and forgiveness can exist without reconciliation. You can forgive someone and still decide that you do not want to be their friend anymore, you can forgive an ex and still refuse to take them back, and you can forgive a parent and still maintain boundaries with them.
That is why I think we need to stop treating forgiveness and forgetting as though they are the same thing. Sometimes people intentionally refuse to forget because history has a way of repeating itself and remembering what someone did can be the thing that helps them recognise a pattern the next time it shows. Forgetting is not the price someone has to pay to prove that they have forgiven, and remembering what happened does not really mean someone is refusing to heal.
And this is also why there is a need for us to rethink “make up” when it comes to African women, because making up should not mean returning to the relationship exactly as it was before and pretending nothing happened because the person has apologised. Sometimes making up means making peace with the fact that a relationship has changed permanently, making peace with the fact that you can love someone and still leave them, and you can forgive them and not trust them again.
We need to understand that sometimes what we call forgiveness is us pressuring a woman to make everyone else comfortable with what was done to her.
