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Rapes Go Ignored By Kenyan Police

Cara

Trigger Warning

This article about unperformed rape investigations in Kenya is a few weeks old, but still outrageous and heartbreaking.

Hundreds of Kenyan women have reported being raped during ethnic clashes that left more than 1,300 people dead over the course of two months.

The actual number of rapes committed likely totals over 3,000 according to the Federation of Women Lawyers – Kenya, which is known as FIDA.

A year later, police have brought just four cases to court.

Earlier this fall the odds of justice for victims seemed much better.

At that point, Kenya seemed set to break new ground in a region where sexual violence coupled with vast political violence has long met with official indifference. The combination of a combative civil society, international pressure and the threat of a referral to the International Criminal Court had encouraged hundreds of women to speak up.

Why aren’t cases being prosecuted?  As is almost always the case, it seems to be a lack of will.

Kenya police and the Federation of Women Lawyers launched an all-women task force to investigate and prosecute cases of sexual violence. With a victim’s consent, the force would be able to access hundreds of DNA samples collected during the violence and analyzed with equipment donated from the United States.

“That evidence would be very conclusive if only the police are able to match it with suspects,” said Teresa Omondi, programs manager at the gender violence recovery center at Nairobi Women’s Hospital. “If they visited the hospital they would be given samples but no police officer has come as of yet.”

Last month, however, the Federation of Women Lawyers left the task force, saying the police had excluded them from the investigation and implying they had concerns over the safety of witnesses.

“It was a very uncomfortable position of telling women we cannot give you any guarantees because the police will not give them to us,” Patricia Nyaundi, the federations’s executive director, said. “Unfortunately you are dealing with a society where, for such cases, the gravity of the offense is lost on people.”

Just three of the 534 DNA samples from the Nairobi Women’s Hospital have been used by private investigators. Women interviewed by Women’s eNews said police had not begun investigating their cases, reported nearly a year ago.

In other words, this whole task force was seemingly a ruse to make it look like something was being done about these atrocities and human rights violations when nothing was intended to be done at all.  With many police accused in the rapes as well as hundred of murders, they have little motivation to do investigations that will likely implicate themselves or their friends in heinous crimes.  The whole damn things screams of both high and low level cover up.

Here’s one outrageous statement of dismissal from not just any old police officer, but a police spokesperson:

“Investigation is a tedious, painstaking exercise,” said Kenya police spokesperson Eric Kiraithe, who said international attention to the rape charges was overheated. “When you hear some of these stories, they are very, very annoying. It is only that the international community are so gullible.”

Yes, yes, I’m sure that stories like the ones told in the article of women being raped by up to 20 men, raped by police officers, raped in front of their children, or raped so brutally that they died from the injuries, are very, very boring to the men who have the power to do something about bringing the perpetrators to justice.

I don’t know what else to say other than that this is straight up instituionalized misogyny and rape culture.  And I wish I had an answer.

ETA: In addition to wishing I had the answer, I’m also eager for us to come up with one.  Does anyone know what a reasonable action would be on this issue?  Can the U.N. do something?  If so, is there a particular office we ought to write to?  If anyone knows, please leave answers in the comments.

13 thoughts on Rapes Go Ignored By Kenyan Police

  1. I’d just like to take this opportunity to apologise for the rampant misogyny in Kenyan society. I suppose this is why I choose to live elsewhere. Even within urban centres and among the supposed elite, there are still a number of restrictions on women’s behaviour.

    I think there is still a law on the statute books making it legal for a man to kill his wife if he was “disciplining” her. Victorian values and traditional African culture do not a safe environment make.

  2. That police spokesperson is making me want to rip all the skin off my face. “God, it’s so tedious and annoying when women want basic rights to not be violated and grievously injured. Why can’t people in the international community just realize that we have better things to do than make sure fully half our citizens have even an iota of safety?”

  3. I appreciate that sweeping theoretical claims are little comfort to flesh-and-blood survivors, but – just as neither army in a war has much reason to worry about killing civilians, no faction of a male-dominated power structure has much reason to worry about violence against women. In the short-term we can exert pressure on that structure from outside, but if we want it to protect women from men in the long term, we will probably need it to be filled with women – which in turn is unlikely as long as women can only get into it by successfully competing with men while under the pressure to do two shifts, raise children, look sexy, and ‘not be a bitch’.

  4. Good post – I’ve spent a lot of time in the area and it stems from deeply embedded misogyny in the culture and mis-education. UNIFEM and Amnesty International almost always have great action items. I also recommend contacting the Binti Pamoja Center here: http://cfk.unc.edu/binti-pamoja.php to see how you can help.

  6. I couldn’t agree more Alderson Warm-Fork. I think it is the same problem here, we are just a little farther ahead, and the consequences are a bit less extreme. Its always going to be a problem until we start really demanding that our partners share in the unpaid work equally. Instead of arguing, we give up and hire a less fortunate woman to do our “woman’s work.”

    As far as Kenya is concerned, I wish there was one good concrete answer. International pressure is good. But the little NGO’s, working to help empower women are the ones doing the most good. It just feels too much like drops in a bucket. We also need to look at the world bank, the IMF, and our trade policies that help to keep undeveloped countries dependent on us. It hinders their development, and subsequently, equality for women.

  7. Just want to spread a little hope here. Please visit our website at IMWORTHDEFENDING.org.
    This issue is my point exactly. Women and children are being raped around the world everyday and they can’t wait for prosecutions or legislation or police enforcement. They need help NOW.
    Self defense is NEVER mentioned in any rape prevention plan anywhere. Not with the UN, not with Amnesty Intl… we need to get SD on the global front burner. It’s all most women and children will ever have in the moment of attack.

  8. It would be wrong to view the rapes committed during the ethnic conflicts as symptoms of war and chaos, and naive to think any police action or task force could do something about it. Rape and sexual abuse are deeply embedded in the social structure of many Kenyan ethnic communities, beginning with the family and extending up through school. If you read the remarks of the earliest missionaries who began working in Kenya, they read like radical feminists in their criticism of how women were treated like cattle, or rather less respectfully than cattle. Today, as we face rampant unemployment and deepening poverty, the anger and frustration of young men with no future is taken out on girls. “Uncles” routinely claim rights of sexual access to their teenaged female relatives. Rape begins at home, continues at school, and is enshrined in the nearly-universal notion that a woman never has the right to say “no.” As head of a college which trained ministers (both men and women), one of my major responsibilities was working with Kenyan colleagues to educate both men and women in the notion that women do have the right to say no to sex, and that men don’t have the right to impose themselves on women, especially not on underage girls. When these problems are discussed in the open–which is difficult, even in a Kenyan-only setting–denial is top of the menu, followed quickly by the tendency to blame girls and women for ‘being seductive,’ whatever tha means.

    It is what a Kenya psychotherapist I know–one of our college’s most helpful resource-persons–calls a “deep-culture problem.” It is therefore, to my mind, a joke to think that the government could do anything even if it wanted, since such a high percentage of both male government officials and male police officers are probably complicit in rape and sexual abuse in their own homes and communities.

  9. Invariably, I cringe when I see posts like this on Feministe. It has not been easy for me to formulate an explanation for this, as I do not *at all* wish to apologize for rapes like these. That said, I do wish that every Western feminist out there would read Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s article “Through Western Eyes,” along with her book, Feminism without Borders, before even beginning to write about so-called “Third World women” in this way.

    I’ll just name a couple of things that make me uncomfortable here. Following Mohanty, I think we need to be extremely self-reflective about what we choose to disseminate and to say about women who live in postcolonial contexts like Kenya (or, hell, about any women whose contexts differ from our own). All too often, we fall into representing a monolithic narrative about “African women” as passive victims who lack agency and personhood. Ultimately, we focus mostly on terrible things that happen to “African women” without talking about particularly situated women themselves. There are Kenyan grassroots groups that are taking on these issues. I wonder what they’re doing right now?

    Second, I think it always, always bears reflecting on the power disparities between we who construct these narratives and the actual women who we write about.

    Finally, I have serious problems with articles that are uncritically put forward about “ethnic conflicts” in various parts of Africa, including Kenya. These conflicts are not usually, in fact, about “ancient ethnic hatreds” when they happen in an African context–not anymore than they are in any other part of the world. Although many conflicts can be superficially traced along “ethnic” lines, they are usually far more complex than that, and I would venture that this (like Rwanda, like the DRC) is a *political* conflict and not an “ethnic” one. Narratives about ethnic conflict are both historically inaccurate and tend to present conflicts as hopelessly intractable–as something that “those people” are destined for anyway.

    As for the question about things that “we” can do. Well, not much, really… And we reproduce colonial discourses when we start to think that we can “save them.” That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about rapes in Kenya, but I would suggest that there is very little we can do besides… Well, as long as we’re self-reflective about these things, we might… Find the grassroots organizations in Kenya that are addressing these issues, and donate money to them. Beyond that, it might be worth contacting the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. Sometimes international pressure can help to steer the focus of the office:

    OHCHR-UNOG,

    8-14 Avenue de la Paix
    1211 Geneva 10,

    Switzerland

    Fax: 00 41 22 917 9006

    E-mail: urgent-action@ohchr.org

  11. I want to second the notion that one way to address these issues is to help small nonprofits that are working to empower girls and women in Kenya. But I would, because I run one, called <a href=”http://www.growththroughlearning.org” title=”Growth Through Learning”Growth Through Learning.

    In the stories that we hear from the girls we sponsor in Kenya, there is both room for sadness and room for hope.

    Sadness, because the lives of needy girls in Kenya are often, to our Western eyes, very difficult indeed, and we have significant concerns about the sexual safety of the girls as well as the level of economic dependence upon men that perpetuates sexual abuse.

    Hope, because of the strength of civil society described in other posts, and because there are powerful women in Kenyan society like possible future president and Minister of Justice <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Karua”Martha KaruaMartha Karua and <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai”Wangari MaathaiWangari Maathai who are genuinely inspiring our girls, like Ann whom I quote below, to dream of obtaining more justice and more independence than would have been typical in their parents’ generation.

    “In my society [community], most of the people do not know the purpose of education. Only few candidates from my former school managed to join a high school. Despite of the fee problems that I encounter I am determined and hardworking to achieve my goals. I have managed to be among the top students even after spending most of the school time at home. I want to excel in education and become a person of integrity, where others in my society can learn after me, being an accountant and helping some of the less fortunate in the country. Through prayers and encouragement from others I have come to accept my problems, [and] to continue with education no matter what I encounter.”

  12. “I have serious problems with articles that are uncritically put forward about “ethnic conflicts” in various parts of Africa…[this] is a *political* conflict and not an “ethnic” one”

    This is true and very important. Similarly for

    “there is very little we can do”

    In many cases, one of the causes of ‘ethnic’ conflicts is that non-Africans have wanted to ‘do something’ in Africa, and, having no natural group who would have the slightest reason to support them, exacerbated any pre-existing tension they could find, so they could be someone’s “enemy of an enemy”.

    The Belgians, for example, arrived in Rwanda-Burundi, and decided (I don’t know whether this sickening or hilarious) that the tutsis, because they seemed to have a complex society, must be Europeans – “black Europeans”. This sort of pattern can also potentially be replicated by African states against other Africans – arguably the Rwandan government has exerted a similar sort of influence in the Congo.

    The generation and intensification of ‘ethnic conflicts’ is often a systematic consequence of people trying to ‘do something’ in far-away countries. Though to be fair, that’s mainly governments and intelligence agencies, not feminist blogs.

  13. I agree with you lee. We really need self defense included in these awareness campaigns. Like YESTERDAY!

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