Let’s keep children safe from abuse

Holidays are times when families meet and spend quality time while giving the children a break from their school programme. However, for some, it is a time when predators with immoral ideas will want to harm them.

Sexual and gender-based violence increases when the children are at home. Many of the perpetrators get their opportunity when parents leave their children unsupervised as they go to work. The use of mobile phones and the internet has made reaching children easily and luring them into bad situations. Education and awareness among our children will ensure that they are not vulnerable to monsters that do not see them as children but as objects of sexual abuse.

Economic hardship in Kenya has led to an increase in abuse. Young girls’ lack of basic needs such as sanitary pads will lead them to their prey. This situation is often exacerbated during the holidays when the safety net provided by schools is not available. During holidays, access to school-based support systems like guidance counsellors, teachers, and peer groups is reduced. This lack of support can leave children without a safe space to report or seek help. This is where the parents have to tighten the grip on their children. Take time to talk to your child about their day, what they did, whom they met or where they went. Ask them how they feel about those places and the people they met.

Empowering the community and especially women and girls to have a firm voice to call out their abusers will be a step in the right direction. Since many mothers are young, sensitisation will ensure they are informed of their rights. Improving their economic status will prevent transactional sex that can lead to abuse of their children.

Teach them how to raise children who will not make the same mistakes they made. Avoiding disco matangas, cat-calling by boda boda riders and small tokens will help protect young girls. .

The justice system has failed our children. Bribery and corruption in such cases is unacceptable (though corruption in all cases is unacceptable), but there needs to be a line that cannot be crossed. Cases of sexual abuse should be fast-tracked. A child cannot keep seeing her abuser; it is emotional and mental torture. It is shameful thing when a 15 or 16-year-old girl is defiled and the matter ruled as consent. How does a child consent to an act whose consequences she does not understand?

Purity Nthiana, Human rights defender