Ruminations

Inexcusable Violations

"As a woman and a mother I am outraged and angered by this inhumane, traumatizing and inexcusable violation."
Amina Mohamed, Kenyan foreign minister

"She is doing very well. They are hopeful she will walk again. We wouldn't know how big a problem rape is in essence just because we do not have all the numbers of reported cases, but from the number of cases that we do receive, it is a very, very high number."
"When you have a statistic that low, [number of convictions] what are you inspiring the public to do? The institutions that are supposed to protect and serve us, for instance police and prosecutors, have to start doing a better job. We have to put it out there that there is going to be punishment for people who sexually violate other people."
Lydia Muthiani, deputy executive director, Coalition on Violence Against Women

AFP

The sixteen year old girl was gang-raped, then thrown into a pit latrine in the western Kenyan town of Tingolo. After hospitalization and care she is in a wheelchair. She underwent two surgeries -- one for a fistula, and the second for spinal surgery. When the girl's mother had originally reported the rape to police they said her daughter should be taken to a pharmacy and take painkillers.

Cultural traditions in rural Africa by custom force a victim of rape to leave her home, and to move to another town where her rape might not be known. The incident which occurred in June received little notice until news sources picked up the sentence meted out to her attackers. Police instructed the young men that they would have to mow the grass at the police post, and then they were permitted to leave, sentence carried out.

Since that time the young girl's plight and the punishment given her rapists have become a tinderbox of inflamed emotions. The Internet activist group Avaaz raised a petition calling for prosecution of the men involved and an investigation of the actions of the police involved. Almost 1.4 million people signed that online petition.

Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the young men involved is currently unknown. The chairman of a council of elders in Busia County where the girl lives wants "severe action" taken against the officers who took the complaint of rape and "mishandled it". Some understatement that is. Kenya's inspector general of police has signalled his support of the victim from his personal Twitter account.

The young girl's grandmother has stated: "I want those policemen that released the boys that they had in custody to arrest the parents of the boys who raped my granddaughter so that they can say where the boys are hiding." It's a start, one might like to think, of a social conversion of a virally vicious custom that has too long made victims of women and girls.