Years ago, a mentor of mine, a tough, no-nonsense businessman, gave me a lesson I’ve carried into every corner of my work: learn the difference between signal and noise.
It is the difference between talking and doing, between attention and impact, between activity and results. And nowhere is that difference more life-and-death than in the fight against Sorcery Accusation Related Violence (SARV).
Signal is action. Noise is talk.
Signal is the hard work that produces real change. A perpetrator arrested, charged, and sentenced; that’s signal. It’s difficult. It requires commitment, resources, and follow-through. But it saves lives.
Noise is the easy stuff. Statements. Walks. Forums. Press releases about how “terrible SARV is.” Noise gets attention, but it rarely moves the needle. And noise costs far less courage than signal.
A tragic example
In July, Rosa Yakapus was falsely accused of sorcery in Hela Province. She was dragged to a bridge and shot dead. The video went viral. The country exploded with outrage. Leaders condemned the killing. Eight men were arrested.
And then, once the spotlight faded, all eight were quietly released.
No accountability.
No justice.
No signal.
For Rosa, all we produced was noise.
PNG pours money into noise
Over the last 15 years, enormous funding has flowed into gender-based violence programs. And yet GBV and SARV continue to rise. Why? Because most of that money has been spent on noise, walks, speeches, ribbon days, and “awareness events” not on the grinding work of case management, prosecution, and protection of survivors.
A woman seeking justice for GBV can wait up to five years for a final prosecution. Perpetrators know the system will likely never touch them. That is the predictable result of a country investing in noise instead of signal.
There’s an old saying: Do what you’ve always done, and you’ll get what you’ve always got. PNG keeps doing noise. And we keep getting violence.
Does a glassman fear noise?
Imagine a notorious glassman in the Highlands, a man who earns his living by pointing at innocent people and sending them to torture or death.
What will stop him? A walk in Port Moresby? A forum in a hotel ballroom? A politician’s press release?
He doesn’t lose a minute of sleep over any of that.
But when the glassman in the next district is arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to real prison time, that gets his attention. That is signal.
If we want SARV to end, we must choose signal
Noise has its place. Protests, statements, and awareness can raise awareness. But they do not change behavior.
When slavery ended in the United States, it wasn’t because of speeches it was because a war that demanded real sacrifice. In fact, the war to end slavery in American was the costliest in the history of the nation in terms of lives lost. That is signal.
If PNG is truly serious about ending SARV, then the era of noise must give way to the era of signal. That means arrests. Prosecutions. Sentencing. Survivor support that doesn’t end after the media cycle. It means the long, difficult work that actually stops perpetrators in their tracks.
If we don’t make that shift, we already know where we’ll be in ten years: Sitting in another forum, making another speech, wondering why the killings have not stopped.
Signal saves lives. Noise doesn’t. PNG must choose.
