At the heart of the continued struggle to respond to and prevent gender-based violence in Muslim-majority countries and communities is an often ignored problem: personal accountability and humble reflexivity of scholars on the detrimental impact of knowledge production – beyond the mandated reflexivity statement and IRB approvals. “Damage-centered research” (Tuck 2009, 409) and “academic sects that engage is self-affirming research” (Lake 2011, 465) continue to perpetuate epistemic violence against certain communities being studied and written about. In the context of the Arab Gulf states, contemporary literature in the English Language (1) is devoid of nuances, gendered perspectives, complex local realities, and is predominantly produced by white men (the “experts”). This reflects the gendered structuring of knowledge and masculine/patriarchal ways of thinking (al-Mughni 2001; Al-Rasheed 2013; Sonbol 2014; Al-Ali 2019); (2) Westerncentrism, with shallow and racist depictions of Gulf communities, overshadows discussions on the region, homogenizing the narrative and stigmatizing its people (Al Shehabi 2019; El Saadi 2014); and (3) data and studies on gender-based violence are scarce making this global and multifaceted problem entangled in two simplistic discourses: reductionist liberal views of saving the victimized Arab Gulf woman and patriarchal Islamic dogma of protecting the piety of Arab Gulf woman. Based on research in Kuwait, and utilizing a decolonial feminist lens, I, a Saudi American woman, highlight how a wide range of perpetrators at institutional, legal, and societal levels meshed with global and regional forces of racism, sexism, elitism, and classism, contribute to the persistence of violence–contrary to popular, superficial narratives. I draw attention to how scholarship and policies aiming at addressing gender-based violence require us to complicate and nuance the analysis and pay attention to “the connections, entanglements and multiple forms of power configurations that impinge on people’s lives” (Al-Ali 2019, 28). * The title of this paper is inspired by the following article (with permission from the author): Al-Ali, Nadje. 2019. “Feminist Dilemmas: How to Talk about Gender-Based Violence in Relation to the Middle East?” Feminist Review, no. 122: 16–31.