works integrate social and legal issues and their impact on gender and power structures. Each of Dow's works examines social practices which lead to an imbalance of power relationships and fuel violence against women, child sexual abuse, the AIDS crisis, and gender inequality. Her characters use common sense to resist unreasonable custom but remind the reader of the importance of traditional culture. With her first novel, Far and Beyon′ (2000), Dow focused on a central theme of the AIDS epidemic and violence's effects on families, specifically how women living in a patriarchal society cope with fatherless families because of the devastation it led to in rural Botswana. It explores the limits cultural practices, customs, and institutions place upon girls and women by use of male-oriented structures. In the story, Mara, an illiterate mother with limited ability to support herself, has already had one husband and two sons die from AIDS, another husband abandon her, and her third partner abuse her. Mara attributes her sons' deaths to a hidden enemy and seeks answers from a diviner. Though her daughter, Mosadi (meaning woman), known as Mosa, and remaining son, Stan, do not believe the diviner's rituals will explain why their brothers died, they go along with the ceremonies prescribed. When Mosa discovers she is pregnant and abandoned by the father of the child, she decides to have a secret abortion, rather than burden her mother further. In an effort to heal her family, Mosa evaluates social practices which separate men and women and elevate male roles, teaching women to ignore their transgressions. Remaining loyal to her family and culture, she learns to reject the acceptance of reprehensible behaviours in her community. In this way, Dow explores how societal indulgence of and silence about wrongs in society lead to ideological confusion and exploitation of the powerless by those who are more powerful. Similar themes carried into Dow's second novel, The Screaming of the Innocent (2001), which also examines women's empowerment in a country rife with police corruption, ritual murder, institutional secrecy, and societal silence. Exploring the cultural practice of dipheko, murdering someone to harvest their organs for their magical properties of luck and prosperity, Dow shows how the rich and powerful prey upon the illiterate rural population and buy the silence of authorities. In the book, a little girl is murdered in the bush near her village and information about the case has