Let’s stop the hypocrisy Kenyans! Gender Based Violence Doesn’t Start and End in Nyeri
This week Nyeri town has been in the news a lot!
Everyone has been having a word or two to weigh in on how Nyeri women are the worst women on planet earth. Say what? You heard me. Part of it was bordering comedy, but this is no laughing matter people. Those two men certainly experienced brutality of the worst kind in the hands of their ‘better halves’ after those ‘better halves’ allegedly chopped off the men’s manhood mercilessly within a span of just a week!
You know why this is eliciting the heated debates?
Because these victims are men. It is extremely uncomfortable when tables are turned, right?
Make no mistake; I don’t condone these heinous crimes. But since this is a conversation we must all have, you have to read this article all the way to the end to understand why Nyeri women should not the only ones we should be targeting in our condemnation of gender based crimes.
Every year thousands of girls undergo female genital mutilation under the watch of their fathers, uncles, teachers, chiefs and mothers etc. They are afterwards forced to discontinue their education and married off forcefully to some old village polygamists. We watch in silence. These things happen to our sisters, our nieces and daughters and fellow countrymen or should I say countrywomen? We close our eyes and shut our ears because that is not us. It is them. We prefer not have those conversations regardless of the fact these things happen in our borders. We console ourselves by declaring how better ‘we are’ than ‘them’. At least we have an education and we are not backward, that makes us better than them.
We say it’s their culture to be blamed.
These Nyeri incidences have come months after cases of high profile assaults on women hit the headlines of the Kenyan media.
Assault comes in many forms; FGM, rape, physical assault, forcefully stripping women in public, verbal insults among others. Those are just but a few cases which actually make their way to the mainstream media.
We all remember celebrating after The Nairobi Governor slapped Hon Rachel Shebesh? Ok. We don’t. Do we all remember wanting her to carry the cross for both her and Sonko for the pictures that were leaked to the public― alleging something? I’ll refresh your memory. We said to Shebesh― with our faces grinning tightly― how dare you have an affair? But to Sonko, we simply gave a nod and collectively moved on without a thought or word, right? Weeks later, Shebesh was allegedly slapped by the said Senator. Do we all remember saying she deserved the alleged assault? Jokes after jokes flew all over in our public and private spaces condoning the slapping and blaming her exclusively for the alleged affair, remember? What about the verbal assault to Caroline Mutoko by the same Senator on live radio?
Welcome on board people. Thousands of women are assaulted by the men in the lives from husbands to brothers to chiefs to employers to colleagues to strangers every day. There seems to be some sort of collective agreeable silence when it comes to issues of violence against women. That nobody wants to talk about it because things have always been that way and we all collectively, silently agree that they should remain that way. When a woman has been rapped for instance, we all say ‘of course rape is wrong, but what the hell was she doing there with that man?’
When scores of women were stripped one after another in Nairobi and Mombasa among other Kenyan towns, most of us questioned their person, morality and dress code first before addressing the heinous nature of the crimes perpetrated against them. We asked why they were wearing minis and not long presentable dresses like the ones our nuns, mothers and grandmothers usually wear. We asked why their tops, dresses, jeans and skirts were tight, short and skimpy.
We questioned the women’s moral standing― collectively as a people― collectively as Kenyans.
When Hon. Joyce Lay came out to complain of the verbal violence against her by MP Businei upon her decline to his sexual advances during their japan Trip, we all said she deserved those insults to the last letter. We excavated her past and claimed that she had no moral authority to say no to any man, just like all women. We all said she was wrong to come out and complain. We all questioned her standards as a woman first, then as a person second. We all said that she should have solved the matter secretly because it happened secretly. Why waste the NA Speaker’s time with such petty personal things? We all said that she should not have gone to drink with Businei in the first place if she did not intend to pursue what she started at the bar all the way to the bedroom. Collectively, we asked, ‘why would a married woman have drinks with a man who is not her husband late in the night?’ We absolved the MP Businei of any blame in the matter. We gave him the ticket to continue living his life guilt free because ― guilt is something women have to feel but not men.
Don’t even get me started, how many months have passed since Imenti Central MP Gideon Mwiti allegedly rapped that young woman in his office? How far is the case? ―To the dogs maybe?
I refuse to call that Businei man honorable because he deserves none of it; same applies to Gideon Mwiti, Mike Sonko and Kidero and many of their calibers.
The examples of women assaulted either physically or verbally or on social media or by the court of public opinion are way too many and concentrated that I would run out of time if I were to start counting; from Nancy Baraza to Shebesh to Lay to Khadija― the teenager from Mandera burnt beyond recognition by her husband― to the women stripped last year to those rapped in matatus to those assaulted hundreds of times by their care givers.
No. There’s no time to truly count. I can guarantee you that. We would start now and end in 2030 if we were to give account of all women that suffer assault of any form in this country from men.
But we don’t talk about it.
By giving these examples should be in no way be taken to mean that I condone ―in any way― violence against some men in the hands of women or violence against women by fellow women or men to men or men to animals or whatever. I’m simply trying to give us all the bigger picture of the state of gender based violence in Kenya.
Violence of any kind is wrong and that’s that. But women suffer more. Statistics can prove that.
I condemn the chopping of the men’s genitalia in Nyeri in the highest sense. That no one should feel unsafe in his or her own home, place of work or country for that matter. People, what I’m trying to say is this, that we rarely see a public uproar and hundreds of hash tags angrily aimed at individuals who are men; rather they aim to praise or make fun and comic relief out of it. When Kanyari touched and exposed those women’s breasts in public we all laughed. It was― no― it is no laughing matter
But the reverse is true. When victims are women, it is just another day in the office for all of us.
Maybe it’s time we paused and inspected what our values truly are as a nation, as a culture. Are we biased in our judgments in anyway when it comes to some crimes on some people? Are we?
Does something become wrong only when it aims one social group and not the other?
I’m not just telling you this from a spectator’s angle. I’ve been there.
A few months ago I myself was a victim of a very brutal assault at my place of work. A junior employee of the company that I work for― who happens to be a man― physically ambushed me and beat me up at the office. It happened so fast that by the time I screamed for help the maniac was already finished with me. Honestly I can’t even narrate to you how it happened, but what I can tell you is this, it was the shortest nightmare. I happen to work in an environment that involves interaction with a lot of men; actually all my interactions are men both above and below. I reported the incident to my boss but even he didn’t want to take up the issue, why? ―Because I’m a woman. That’s the only assumption I can come up with, what else is there?
The good women are the silent ones. Women must remain silent and if they dare speak up, their word must be taken with a grain of salt. This was notwithstanding that there were witnesses to the crime at my office.
Luckily for me, I called the police and my assaulter was taken into custody. Don’t mistake this to mean that he faced trial, or that he is rotting away in jail, because no sooner was he arrested than he was released. Even our police department is poorly equipped to handle issues related to gender based violence, which unfortunately majority of victims are women.
Majority of people who suffer gender based violence are women. That’s the sad reality.
That is why I want the full implementation of the 2003 sexual offences act that Njoki Ndung’u worked so hard for. A desk to address such offences as recommended in the act should be placed in all police stations countrywide and government should invest in human resource capable of dealing with through empathizing, counseling and rehabilitating victims rather than victimizing them any further. It is traumatic enough that you’ve been hurt; you don’t need some police man to make you feel even lousier about it by inflicting further emotional torture. What would it cost us to train people in trauma counseling and placing the experts in such in our police stations?
Because trust me, the cases that are reported and much less than the real number on the ground. Because we’ve been socialized to believe that it is shameful to come out and declare that someone hurt you. You are viewed as a coward and weak or whatever! We need to equip our police and prosecution with the right tools to prosecute any cases like these to their logical ends. Let’s not only shout the loudest when it feels like we are the ones targeted. Nobody should be at risk in this country and if that happens, then we must count on where we pay taxes to get justice at the very least.
Something needs to be done in regard to prosecuting these cases otherwise our supposed uproar on these Nyeri incidences remains just that― an act of hypocrisy.
Catherine Amayi is a Scientist, an author of fiction and nonfiction
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Email: ccamayi@yahoo.com