MAKUENI, Kenya, Dec 23- The 16 days of activism against gender-based violence ended on the 10th of December.
But while the season to create awareness worldwide against a vice that takes away, dignity of the victims and sometimes their lives, sexual, physical and emotional abuse continues to be witnessed in many Kenyan homes all year round.
Many a times, the victims and survivors live a life of seclusion and misery because they have no safe haven to turn to.
In Makueni county, the tides of change are slowly washing in hope.
Nestled among the lush green that frames these villages in Makueni, are lives battered and bruised.
Behind the beauty that could just pass as a piece of heaven, for many here, It is a slice of hell.
The squeezed pathways leading to Kikoko village in Kilungu, are tucked in the steep inclines in the hilliest parts of Makueni.
Walking through them feels like staring down an abyss.
In this compound, a man gently holds his granddaughter. His mien revealing little of the strife that he and his family has had to endure.
As the head of this home, he is the father and the mother of his children and a grandfather to the family’s newest member, a 6-month-old baby.
His wife died ten years ago, while giving birth to their last-born child.
“I am a casual labourer, I work on people’s farms, or sometimes at the quarry, at least to get something to feed my family,” he says.
In between menial jobs, he has to come home to help his youngest daughter with the baby.
She is only 14 years old.
“I have five children, my fourth born is the one who was taken advantage of by a man whom I trusted. She was just 13 years old then. What I can’t understand is why he took advantage of her knowing very well, she doesn’t have a mother,” wearing a dull face, he says.
When her baby was born, the young had to stay in hospital for a month.
And he had to make the 6-kilometer journey from home, to check on the mother and child on a daily basis.
“The baby was born weighing 1.7 kilos. I had to walk to the health centre every day, to take pampers and soup for her mother. It also took me a week to get her the linda mama cover, to enable them pay the bills after a long stay at the facility,” he stated.
The 14-year-old girl, suddenly thrust into motherhood. Like a child she is, she had trouble adjusting.
There’s little her father could do to help her nurse the baby. She had to find her own way. At some point, her former teacher came to the family’s rescue.
“When she was sent to the hospital, her father came to me. He didn’t know what clothes or supplies to get her. I hurried home and got him what he needed to take to hospital,” the teacher says.
All torn up by her circumstance, she gives us a glimpse into her pain.
Her child, the fruit of an unspeakable act by someone she knew too well and even trusted even.
Ndanu, not her real name, tells of a tale of being lured to her sexual abuser’s den frequently by use of money, snacks and food.
“The very first time, he came at our gate and asked me to go with him. He bought me some biscuits and milk and asked me not to tell anyone about it. He promised that he would tell me something the following day. The following day, I went to his place through a back door where he started touching me inappropriately.,” the teenager mother narrates.
She was then enmeshed in frequent hide and seek sessions with his abuser to stay under his wife’s radar.
With the gifts luring her to her abuser’s den, ranging from sugar cane to money.
Her baby is now at the centre of a paternity battle that’s been playing out in court.
The baby’s grandfather, restrained by law from speaking about the case, still hopes the law will shackle the perpetrator, and emotionally free her daughter’s long robbed childhood.
“We realized she was pregnant at 13 years while she was in class 6. We informed the father and started following up the matter,” says her teacher.
The teachers hope that she will get a second chance to pursue education in the future.
From the remote hamlets to the urban areas, the scars of violence against innocence run deep under the veil of normalcy.
In another home, the children’s laughter encircles the air.
They play and bond, oblivious of their complex blood relations.
All three of them share a father. But one of them was born of a forbidden act.
A father who forced himself on his daughter.
The baby’s grandmother breaks down every time she thinks of how her husband took away her daughter’s dignity.
Kaman – not her real name, remembers all too well the events that led to her becoming a mother even before her 14th birthday.
“It was on a Saturday in June when my Dad asked me to help him with a cup of tea. My siblings were first sent to buy a bread. But as I served him, he got hold of me and raped me,” Kaman says.
Her own father, she says, threatened and intimidated her into silence.
Until the secret she kept could no longer be hidden.
Her mother Selina can only cry at the thought of what befell her daughter.
“It is pains me. When she was rape by his father, he proceeded to warn her against ever informing me. It happened last year. I only came to know of the incident when I discovered she was pregnant,” a teary mother says.
The perpetrator was handed a 20-year sentence after being found guilty of rape.
A DNA test that proved he was the baby’s father, sealed his fate.
“I now have my hopes on the church for counsel,” she says.
This church embodies the strain of this endless sexual violence that has ripped through the community.
It is their sole source of solace amid the turmoil.
The social workers here help the children muster the courage to speak out against those who would do them harm.
It’s a guide to an uncertain life for the children aged between 10 and 17.
At the end of the session the children write down their own experiences and their fears. Those tests that bind them all together.
From the scribblings on the cards and out of the diverse backgrounds shared, a pattern emerges.
The social worker receives all manner of questions including that of “a girl who was forced to have sex with her father, so as to have increased pocket money. What was the immediate action that she should have taken because, she is not willing?”
Another girl says “When someone has been raped by her pastor and goes to tell the church leadership, they don’t want to take control. What can someone do?”
“Mine is just a question on how to deal with close relatives who harm their nephews and nieces, in the name that they are just assisting them because they are orphans. How can we as girls deal with the men who abuse us as orphans? Just help,” asks another one.
This an ensemble of ghosts that haunt them.
The Makueni County referral hospital is the beating heart of the county.
The hospital isles and walkways are teeming with patients and their minders checking on their loved ones on the mend.
But behind these walls, and amid the flutter of hospital activity, some other patients are secretly healing their emotional scars, above their visible, physical ones.
When Shahid News team arrived at the facility, health workers were attending to one such patient.
She was brought in a week ago with a broken jaw and needed reconstructive surgery.
The path that led her here was born of peril.
She had argued with her husband, after she took her money, some Sh50. This, she says, it is all she had to put food on the table for the day.
Her incessant pleas to give it back, earned her a broken jaw.
Wavinya, not her real name, explains what befell her on that fateful night.
“I was angry and decided to sleep not knowing I had given him a chance to attack me,” she says.
She is now on the mend, at least for her physical wounds.
But she still worries for her children, and her husband who had become a stranger to her.
While at the hospital’s gender recovery centre, she gets the care she needs to heal her body and mind
“Since march to date, we have had cases of domestic violence, whereby the women are more affected. They are violated by their husbands because they expect the husbands to provide, but most of them, lost their jobs. There is lot of marital conflict and when they fight, their children are affected emotionally,” Psychologist Peninah Ndonye says.
She attributes the worrying trend to alcohol and substance abuse.
The GBV recover center has so far received 141 cases of sexual assault, 84 cases of physical assault, and 7 cases of sodomy involving young children.
The facility has also lost 7 people who succumbed to injuries while receiving care.
Between January and September, Makueni county has recorded a startling 786 cases of domestic and sexual violence.
Nominated Member of County Assembly Janet Katunga says, that “One thing, that I’m going to share is that I have not been happy with the law enforcers. Because we have such beautiful laws, but they are not implementing them. You find that perpetrators of SGBV are going scot free.”
“Why is this still happening yet there are laws, why are duty bearers not implementing their duties?” she wonders.
While they seek medical care and safety away from harm, an isolated centre in a discreet location, will be a temporary haven.
“The key admission criteria, can be either security, or when the perpetrator has not yet been apprehended. When they move to the safe shelter, if they were on medical management, they continue receiving the care, and in addition we have a psychologist, where they continue their programme of psychotherapy,” says Lugogo Athman, a GBV case coordinator at Makueni County Referral hospital.
The shelter has two wings for either gender.
The empty beds, he says, represent the patients who have succeeded in piecing together their torn lives and had the courage to go back home.
Those who end up here at the facility are only catered for 14 days before being released back into the community.
The centre has been up and running since March, when the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Kenya.
Dr. Athman says, “The cases we were getting we admitted straight here. And at that time the reporting was low. It took two months for reporting to get back to normal and we started receiving cases of since March. Until now there are cases that are still coming up that are a little bit delayed. It is a challenge because the evidence collection has been destroyed,”
The recovery centre was the brainchild of the Makueni County administration which hopes to enforce measures against violence through policies and legislation.
Makueni Deputy Governor Adelina Mwah says that they have done much to enable justice be served, “We have a children’s policy and we also have a gender mainstreaming policy so that’s the foundation. Without a policy, if another government comes up and finds this gender recovery center, it might do away with it.”
While victims receive medical care, they also get legal aid to begin the process of seeking justice for the atrocities committed against them.
On the floor of the Makueni county assembly, Janet a nominated member, and an activist against sexual violence, is kicking her fight against GBV to a notch higher.
She has proposed a bill seeking to secure the rights of persons against sexual harassment or violence within the workplace and keep those preying on the vulnerable at bay.
“People should understand that these rights are God given and they should not be tempered with,” she says.
The bill proposes training of the law enforcement agencies and the local leadership on how to handle cases of gender violence.
Janet believes, “even the boy child is getting sodomised, so they need to participate in helping us curb the loopholes that cause people to take advantage of the vulnerable.”
For this scarred and scared people, it is an arduous journey with no finish line in sight.
Like prisoners without a name or cells without numbers, they harbour a strong desire for change…
For now, they will wait for the storm to pass.
Want to send us a story? Contact Shahidi News Tel: +254115512797 (Mobile & WhatsApp)
