Recently I’ve been asking myself what my 80-year-old self would think looking back at her life. Would she want to have lived a life of obedience or a life of rebellion? It’s the game changing question whenever I have a dilemma.
Society perceives obedience as protection but to me it can also be the thief of freedom. When we don’t obey the law, we are putting ourselves and others at risk of harm. Law and order act like the shell of a tortoise shielding us from danger. Yet hiding too long carries a greater cost. We risk missing out on the possibilities that the world could offer us. More importantly, we risk ignoring our own intuition - the quiet voice that helps us write our own story.
Obedience can be blinding. We lose our rationality when we believe that obeying a rule will ‘save us’ or pull us out of danger. Just as we do when we follow a person in authority, because we believe they hold power. In doing so we neglect our own agency. Authority becomes a structure that demands respect and our minds will bow down to it out of fear. We forget what unites us all in these great debates we have created. In the myriad of cultures, laws, and religious orders we forget our primary purpose that remains the same: to survive.
This tension between obedience and survival does not only exist in our personal lives. It also appears in global policy frameworks that claim to protect communities. For instance, Breton et al. (2025) who explores sexual violence policy in Zambia, states that sexual violence responses are often organised around logical interventions rather than survivor defined needs. Donor funding priorities shape which interventions, including reporting systems, are made possible.
As a result, technical aspects and individualised behaviour traits become the primary focus while disregarding the large scale socio-economic context that determines sexual violence. This, therefore shows that decision-making about what stories are legible and what counts as “success” is often privileged over financial constraints and contextual vulnerabilities of affected communities.
This raises a deeper question about who defines justice, empowerment, and safety in global issues. It echoes: ‘who decides what knowledge counts’ and ‘whose voices define the solutions we take’.
More broadly, global narratives of empowerment, modern justice and decolonisation, often shaped by powerful institutions, dictate these internal beliefs that later influence the systems we follow. These can override meanings of safety and justice where micro level interactions reproduce macro-level inequalities. Survivors will be forced to silence themselves -particularly when reporting sexual violence - to avoid ‘shame’, ‘blame’, ‘peer pressure’ and ‘disbelief’, and thus resist global framings even whilst suffering harm. In fact, these global narratives defined by global institutions can become hegemonic if imposed without listening to those they claim to serve. To prevent such form of control, current implementations should adapt with intention to what is needed rather than what is externally prescribed. It requires listening to voices of lived experience.
Perhaps the choice is not between obedience and rebellion, but between obedience and listening. Listening to our intuition and listening to lived voices. Systems designed to protect us must leave space for the voices of those most affected to shape solutions themselves. In obeying law and order, we must not forget our instincts of survival. There is great depth in our own voices which are not to be ignored. This way we can not only survive, but thrive knowing that our future generations are in safe hands.
