Abstract:
Gender Based Violence (GBV) has been alarmingly on the increase in the recent past the world
over, and it is regarded as a global pandemic issue due to perceived existing inequalities
including women dependency on their male counterparts within societies; as an expression
of gender inequity and/or toxic masculinity, GBV is considered a pandemic that exists in all
humanity and societies at varying degrees of occurrences and severity. Therefore, there is a
need for contingent mitigating mechanism to shield marginalized sections of societies i.e.
women and girls against GBV pandemic. In order to mitigate GBV, it is necessary to analyse
factors that lead to Gender Based Violence against women whilst exploring available coping
mechanisms that female victims of abuse may employ. This thesis therefore, analyses two
novels, The Uncertainty of Hope and The Fading Sun to determine why economically
independent women remain in abusive relationships; the study employs radical feminist
theory to digest and harmonise the two selected novels with literature in its exploration to
create readers understanding of how they view Gender Based Violence from a difference
lenses in cognisance of the belief that women get abused because they are financially,
economically and support‐wise depending on their counterparts. Moreover, the study aims
to explores few Gender Based Violence remedies by looking at the coping mechanisms as
highlighted in the two literary texts used for this research; this is with the view that the study’s
findings would eventually help women in abusive relationships to learn to cope and discover
coping mechanisms other than separation which many a times negatively affect children.
