Eric Ayiro,
KAKAMEGA, Kenya, May 25- Joyce runs an M-PESA shop at the heart of Kakamega town along the busy Kakamega Webuye road.
She occasionally stops our talk as she serves customers with a beaming smile enough to conceal the dark past of her child life.
In 2011, when her father defiled her, she was just 16.
She gave birth and by the time her child was 4, the sentence for life was delivered to her father, then in his late 60s after a successful conviction for incest.
She granted us an interview but with a request that we don’t share her photo.
“I am not married and potential suitors may avoid me if they see my photo in the press,” she says with a convincing silky but stern voice.
When she conceived after the defilement, her life stopped. She moved to stay with her uncle, locked herself indoors for the better part of her pregnancy and even stopped schooling for two years to care for her son.
Her uncle could later convince her to go back to school as the state intervened to find a Children’s home for her baby.
“No doubt, I love my child; I even go to check on him when the motherly instinct hits, but the thought that I sired him with my father keeps coming whenever I think of staying with him. What will I say when he demands to know who the real father is?” she posed.
Om May 14, 2011 the girl was locked in the house by her father after her mother passed on and defiled repeatedly for days, the court was told.
Her step-brothers rescued her by breaking the door of the room where she was locked as a sex slave.
It took three months to arrest her father who was apprehended on September 23, 2011, and, four years to have the case heard and determined at Bungoma law court.
“The four years of going to court to find justice against my father were agonizing,” she says.
The lengthy period the arrest and trial of her father took reflects the tolerant standards society place on gender-based violence as per the National Gender and Equality Commission (NGEC).
The Commission characterized gender-based violence (GBV) as “the most widespread and socially tolerated human rights violation” in the country in a report done some three years ago.
“About 39 percent of women and girls in Kenya aged 15 and above have experienced physical violence, with approximately one in four experiencing such violence each year,” the report says.
Joyce’s incident could be similar to that of another 15-year-old who is housed at the Peace Girl Rescue Centre Kakamega and undergoing therapy to heal from the incest ordeal.
“I see her attitude shift to the worse in the week she attends court to testify against her father who is accused of defiling her. The pressure from her community who are against her testifying made the Children’s department bring her here” said Judith Naliaka who cares for about twenty girls rescued from sex slavery at the facility.
“I have to constantly talk to her to ward off the pressure and see her return to normalcy.”
Mothers can also be part of violence against their own children according to pundits. The rescue centre equally houses two girls who were rescued from their barmaid mother from Kawangware, Nairobi in 2019.
The Children’s officer said she admitted them to the centre since their mother was a drug addict and she could walk to the house late at night in their house, and engage in sex with different men as the children watched.
“The mother works as a part-time prostitute. The clients the mother brings to the house have attempted to molest the girls who are highly exposed to defilement,” reads the report on the situation of the girls who are now in primary school.
Even as the rate of girls and women being victims of GBV has remained historically higher than that of men and boys, Maendeleo Ya Wanaume chair Nderitu Njoka, believes any case of GBV deserves decent treatment.
“I have had to walk to police stations several times to protest at how men brutalized by their wives are handled. A man goes to book an assault case against him by his wife and he is asked to bring the wife for the matter to be booked,” said Njoka.
“How can you drag a person who beat you and is arguably greater in might than you to the police?”
He regrets that some police officers laugh off men victims who report cases of GBV. The bad ones demand bribes to book the reports as another NGEC study that documented the cost of GBV attests.
The 2016 study provided disturbing statistics on the economic burden of gender-based violence on survivors and to the country.
The report, the Economic Burden on (GBV) Survivors, put the average cost of medical-related expenses for every survivor and family of GBV victims at Sh Sh16, 464.
“Reporting the incident to a chief cost Sh3, 111, reporting to police cost Sh 3,756, productivity loss from serious injuries amounted to Sh 223,476, productivity loss from minor injuries was Sh18, 623, and productivity loss from premature mortality from GBV amounted to Sh5, 840, 664,” it says.
The report further indicates that perpetrators of GBV and their families similarly incur heavy losses arising from incarceration, litigation, social stigma, and loss of time and productivity.
A perpetrator incurred costs of about Sh 33,000 in legal fees, Sh 85,000 in court fines, and Sh 20,000 in other costs related to litigation. Lost monthly income due to incarceration was about Sh28,000 per perpetrator.
“These combined costs have societal implications for perpetrators, their families, and the country. They represent a waste of resources which would otherwise have been channeled to more productive sectors,” said the report signed by then acting chair of NGEC, Florence Nyokabi.
But all is not gloom in the fight against GBV. The High Court recently ruled that the State was negligent to investigate and prosecute the 2007-08 post-election sexual violence against four women.
The women were awarded Sh4 million each on December 10, 2021, in the landmark case that will perhaps wash away the cavalier attitude law enforcers and the general public has toward GBV.
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