Vurugu – Violence against women looks the same worldwide.

Dianne Post: 2 April 2011

I have been in Kenya a month now working on a training manual for police-prosecutors on sexual and gender-based violence.  The first month was devoted to research and reading over two thousand pages of reports, documents and laws.  Half the population lives under the poverty level, the women own five percent of the land but do eighty percent of the subsistence farming and contribute sixty percent of the gross national product. Yet when their husbands die, widows are thrown off farms they worked for decades, because traditionally widows can’t inherit though this is no longer true under the law. Widows are cleansed of their dead husband spirits by being forced to have unprotected sex with a stranger, who is paid to rape her.  The HIV-AIDS rate is ten percent overall but twice as high among women in the 25-40-age range. A dowry payment means that the man has purchased the woman; she is property and has no rights.  Women in the slums, and Nairobi has the biggest slum in the world, cannot go to the bathroom especially at night for fear of rape.  Taxi drivers do not stop at red lights in the city at night for fear of kidnapping.  Average life span is fifty-two for men and sixty for women.  One hardly knows where to start.

Upwards of eighty percent of women in Kenya have suffered domestic violence and seventy percent have suffered sexual violence.  Sixty percent of teen girls said that rape was their first introduction to sex.  Babies as young as a eighteen-months and grandmothers as old as eighty-six have been raped.  If a girl refuses a male’s advances, he feels justified to “discipline” her by raping her, and he’s a hero.  To be impregnated by a teacher is an honor because then the child will be supported.  In one of the saddest case I have ever seen, a severely disabled girl with one arm missing, one not working right, and both legs useless was raped and impregnated.  She was happy.  Now that she had produced a child, she was a woman and could enter society as a mother rather than remain a disabled outcast. 

But before you shake your head and mutter over the terrible situation in Kenya or any other country, look around.  A six-month-old baby was raped and disemboweled in the U.S.  A ninety-year-old woman was raped and murdered.  While U.S. official statistics say that sixty percent of women have suffered domestic violence and thirty-three percent sexual assault, my personal experience after working in the field for thirty years is that the figure is closer to ninety-five percent, especially if you count date and marital rape.  The courts often give custody or unsupervised visitation of children to violent fathers who too frequently murder them. And as for fitting in to society, let’s not forget the eight-year-old in the UK who is already shooting up with Botox, the women in New York who have their toes cut off to fit into narrow, high heel shoes, and the ever more popular “designer vaginas” – FGM by another name.  

Progress is being made.  A new constitution was passed in Kenya in August 2010 that limits the president to two terms instead of life.  Women have a thirty percent guarantee in political elections and appointments that should lead to improvement over time.  The literacy rate is high.  A sexual assault act was passed in 2006 but hasn’t resulted in the hoped for reduction of assaults. Many police, prosecutors and judiciary are biased and corrupt.

Only seventy-two state prosecutors who are trained in law and three hundred police prosecutors manage the hundred thousand prosecutions a year. Only six of the police prosecutors are lawyers, some have other degrees, some have the equivalent of an AA, most are secondary school graduates and some are not even that.  Their conviction rates average from seventy-six percent for those with secondary certificates to ninety-nine percent for the lawyers.  Some of the police prosecutors, who do ninety percent of the prosecutions, are good, but they often lose to better educated, connected and expensive defense attorneys. In general, the level of representation is poor.  Add to that, the discrimination against women and the bias against prosecuting sexual and family based crimes and a lethal result emerges. 

The system is transitioning to all legally trained prosecutors but that will take at least five years and is no guarantee that women will be treated any better. To bring caseloads down to acceptable levels, they need to have two thousand prosecutors.

I work with a national consultant, Violet Mavisi, a former prosecutor and previously presiding judge of the Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court of Kenya.  A consultant from Tanzania had done a recent audit of prosecutor facilities and skills.  Not one office had a computer or a hard copy of the laws.  Imagine representing clients without access to the law, the Rules of Evidence or the Rules of Procedure.  All you know is what you learned in a three-month course.

In the month I have been here, I have met some wonderful and hard working people who do know where to start and are very busy building a nation.  In addition to the national consultant, the head of the witness-protection unit where I work, Alice Ondieki, and her secretary Rosemary as well as several of the attorneys there, several taxi drivers, and the woman I leased my apartment from, are just a few.  Most Kenyans have been very friendly and helpful.  Groups have surrounded me in the market trying to figure out my strange American accent and direct me to the correct place.  And they don’t just tell you the place or show you the place, but they take you there.  Unknown persons have carried heavy boxes for me, women have stopped me on the street to talk, and after a discussion about butt size in the elevator, we’ve broken out into hysterical laughter. Three times in four weeks I’ve been told, “I thought you were a Kenyan.”  So I’ve felt quite welcome.   

Many of the civil society groups we have talked to are also very progressive.  FIDA is a fabulous women lawyers association, whose work is of such high quality, there is no doubt they could do this job.  But it‘s politics.   They accused some high level officials of abuses during the post-election 2008 outbreaks of violence.  The officials were not amused.  Two groups that work on children’s rights (CLAN and CRADLE) have been very vigorous and competent in pushing the newly passed Children’s Act to comply with international standards.  I’m working with them on the part of the training related to children.  The Girl-Child Network is working on rural educational facilities for girls and integrating the disabled into mainstream schools. 

Gender based violence and the response to it differs little around the world in kind or degree.   The root of the problem is the same – power and control.  To maintain power, you must maintain control.  To do that, you must use violence.  But no amount of violence or repression will succeed forever; witness the firestorm rising in the Middle East and North Africa region and the Rust Belt of the U.S.   Those who abuse power and seek to maintain control, whether they be individuals, corporations, political parties, religions or governments, will not and cannot hang on forever.   On my walk home from the grocery store today, I passed a woman at the bus stop with a towering load balanced precisely on her head.  She smiled and said, “Hello, shall I call you mother or sister.”  I said, “Call me sister, we are in this together.”

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