Legal gaps hold back heightened GBV war

Some vices are resistant even to a country’s most punitive laws. Gender-based violence (GBV) is one such; it has resisted every legal and cultural intervention.

Since 1991 when the world came up with ways to end GBV by raising awareness through the 16 Days of Activism, culprits have not budged.

Every year, even during the 16-day campaign, cases increase and take new forms as technology evolves.

While both men and women are victims, women bear the brunt, with men as the main perpetrators.

Based on global GBV statistics, this year’s theme, ‘Orange the world: End violence against women now!’, focuses on the urgency of saving women from the shackles of the vice.

Kenya has great laws and a goodwill to end GBV. President Uhuru Kenyatta, too, pledged to end female genital mutilation (FGM) by next year, but it seems the laws are too shy to deal with such violence.

The wheels of justice turn too slowly to hand survivors the justice they deserve. Some die before justice is served, leaving perpetrators to strike again. And again.

Nothing much has changed in the last 50 years in the scale; only the GBV types have increased.

Recently, I asked an aunt in her 70s, who suffered domestic violence as a young wife in the 1980s, how she felt about her experience. 

GBV still reigns supreme

She said: “It was normal to be beaten even after mid-night, escape and spend the night in a banana plantation. Sometimes you spent the night with a newborn and when morning came, you’d discover a snake lying next to the baby. You just picked the baby and went back to the house as if nothing had happened.”

If the clock were rewound, would she escape this violence?

“No, where would I go? Your brothers and their wives will be hesitant to welcome you to your parents’ home and you have, not one child, but several. You are bound to the abusive man. And every married woman in my time suffered the same fate.”

Unfortunately, this kind of reasoning that normalises GBV still reigns supreme. A man, in his 30s, said about this: “We, young people, don’t care about any law or social structures that condemn GBV. If a woman tells her parents about our behaviour, then we become worse. She can leave if she wants. Do we love them? Really...what is love?”

This kind of attitude is among the reasons GBV keeps occurring. FGM, for example, was banned in Kenya in 2011, with a three-year jail term as punishment. It is, however, still rampant. According to the UN Fund for Population, one in every five Kenyan women has undergone FGM.

It is the same trend with other types of GBV, including sexual violence and harassment, physical assault, human trafficking, emotional and verbal abuse, and cyberbullying.

The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey of 2008/09 records 39 per cent of women aged between 15 and 49 reported to have suffered some form of violence.

Efforts to end GBV

But most cases are never reported. In instances such as defilement, the perpetrator and the child’s family settle the matter through exchanging a goat or the perpetrator marrying the victim. 

Compared to the enormity of the matter, whose punishment is life imprisonment, this kind of ‘arbitration’ that favours the perpetrator, is highly preferred, encouraging the vice.

In sexual harassment cases, offenders wrongly argue that women ‘enjoy’ the attention and say ‘no’ to mean ‘yes’. Such faulty reasoning and watering down the import of the vice derail efforts to end GBV.

Generally, Kenyans do not view GBV as a problem that needs urgent address. If they did, they would not vote for people with a GBV history as their leaders, or buy tickets to attend a show by one of the world’s most notorious artistes with a unique taste for violence against women. 

The last time he was in Kenya, Koffi Olomide beat up one of his dancers. He also has several cases, including defilement, lined up against him, but his Kenyan fans admire him hugely, an insult to his victims who reel from permanent physical and psychological scars.

While victims are urged to seek justice, the law also gives perpetrators a leeway to continue violating victims by threatening them once they get a bond or bail pending hearing of the case. This discourages pursuit of justice. But there is no giving up. The perpetrators must be brought to book if only to stop repeat offences.

What if Kenya one day, just one day, parades all perpetrators at a public space and shoots them...or castrates those found guilty of sexual crimes? Most likely, it will send a chill down the spine of the nation, and perpetrators might think twice before violating anyone thereafter. 

Perhaps we need a presidential decree to put such a law in place. But before that law becomes a reality, we might have to drum into everyone what Justice George Odunga and GBV survivor Jackeline Mwende said last week after the judge upheld her ex-husband Stephen Nthenge’s 30-year sentence. Nthenge chopped off her hands with a panga in 2016. “Know when to walk away and when to run. Don’t buy excuses such as ‘saving’ your marriage; run for your life.”