What Belonging Should Never Cost
Belonging is one of the first things people reach for. A home. A family. A community. A voice that says you matter here. But in Jenna-Leigh Bilong’s conversation with Heidi Giokos on Voices Of Change, belonging becomes a more difficult question. What happens when the places where someone looks for love, safety or acceptance are also connected to harm?
That is the quiet power of this episode. It does not introduce Jenna-Leigh only through what she survived. It begins with who she is: a broadcaster, author, pastor and woman whose voice was shaped long before her pain became part of her public story. She speaks about growing up in the Western Cape, finding broadcasting as a teenager, and building a life around people, purpose and hope.
That beginning matters. It reminds the listener that trauma is never the whole person. Jenna-Leigh says it plainly: what happened is part of her identity, but it is not her identity. That distinction sits at the heart of the conversation. Abuse can leave fear, anxiety, doubt and a fractured sense of self. It can make a person question their worth. It can make even successful women feel incomplete in rooms where everyone else thinks they are coping. But survival is not only about carrying pain. It is also about refusing to let pain become the final author of the story.
The episode is especially careful with shame. Heidi and Jenna-Leigh speak about the questions survivors often carry quietly: Was it my fault? Did I contribute to what happened? Why did I stay silent? These questions are not born in a vacuum. They are often planted by families, communities and institutions that ask survivors to explain themselves instead of asking what failed around them. That kind of blame becomes another wound.
This is where the conversation moves from personal truth into system accountability. Jenna-Leigh reflects on why reporting can still feel unsafe. The fear is not only that people will judge. It is that the system itself may judge. A police station, a workplace, a support structure or an official process can exist on paper and still fail the person standing in front of it.
Heidi and Jenna-Leigh also ask what leadership should look like in a country where women still feel unsafe. The episode makes a clear case for survivor-informed systems: not only women in decision-making spaces, but women who understand fear, silence, coercion, shame and the emotional reality of asking for help.
What makes the conversation hopeful is that it does not pretend healing is simple. Jenna-Leigh speaks about faith, counselling, support and intentionally taking charge of her pain. Healing is not presented as forgetting. It is presented as an agency.
Belonging should never cost a woman her safety. And when a survivor finally reaches for help, the measure of any system should be simple: does it catch her with dignity, or does it make her survive another fall?
Catch up on all Voices of Change episodes here: https://www.enca.com/voices-change-podcast