Creaw Portal

The East African JANUARY 12-18, 2009

The study results attest to the acknowledged view that violence against women pervades all social and ethnic groups, writes Dagi Kimani

IS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN rising or is the apparent spike in reported cases a corollary of bet­ter awareness?

That is the questions con­cerned Kenyan gender and health experts are asking themselves, as reported cases rise and treatment needs outstrip existing specialist facilities. According to a study published late last year in the East African Medical Journal, violence against women is now one of the leading public health prob­lems in Kenya, and a massive public education programme should be put in place to deal with it.

Significantly, the study was based on data collected between February 2003 and April 2004, long before the devastat­ing 2007 post-election violence that saw thousands of women assaulted or killed. Before the eruption of the post-elec­tion violence, police estimated that there were about 2,500 cases of sexual vio­lence in Kenya annually. The study was conducted by Dr H. Saidi, Dr K. Awori and Dr P. Odula from the University of Nairobi's School of Medicine. The trio used data from 663 consecu­tive adult patients admitted to the pri­vately owned Nairobi Women's Hospital Gender Violence and Recovery Centre to analyse the patterns of violence against women.

The hospital provides medical and psychological support to survivors of violence. "Our study results attest to the ac­knowledged view that violence against women pervades all social and ethnic groups," says the report in the journal. "A concerted societal action is required to stem it."Between 2002 and 2005, the hospital attended to 3,128 victims. The figure has since risen to over 5,000 survivors. Many of those admitted to the hospital are children, but these were not included in the study. According to the study, 61.5 per cent of the subjects had been subjected to sexu­al violence, with most of these (75.1 per' cent) being victims of strangers. The latter is in contrast to patterns of sexual assault seen among children, where the perpetrators are often family or close acquaintances.

The study also points to some particu­larly disturbing trends on the emerg­ing trends of gender-based violence in Kenya. Nearly half the sexual assaults were conducted in the homes of the victims themselves, with 9 per cent of the out­rages being perpetrated by groups of three or more assailants. "Three quarters of the assaults were committed late in the day between 4pm and 4am," says the study's report. "The proportion of reported scenes of attack was highest- at 55.8 per cent - for low income areas."

IN CONTRAST TO SEXUAL AT· tacks, the study says, most non­sexual assaults - accounting for 38.5 per cent of cases - reported at the hospital during the study period were perpetrated by an intimate partner known to the victim, who mostly acted alone. Most of the victims of such assaults were married women attacked by their husbands for reasons ranging from quarrels over infidelity or family finances to children.

The Nairobi Women's Hospital Picture: Anthony Kamau

The researchers readily admit that the reported incidence of violence against women is probably lower than the actual incidence. "If communities continue to ignore gender violence as a crime, family con­flicts continue to discourage reporting, and cultural sensitivities persist, the true picture and magnitude of the prob­lem will remain unclear," Dr Saidi and his colleagues say in their report. One particularly grey area, the re­searchers say, is marital rape. This is probably under-reported because of cul­tural and social reasons. This could explain why in the study, less than one per cent of victims reported sexual assault by their regular partner.

"Many women would not consider forced intercourse with their partners as rape," Dr Saidi and his colleagues say in their report. "Further, the Kenyan Penal Code does not recognise marital rape as a criminal offence because of the pre­sumption, especially in customary law that consent is given by the act of mar­riage." What's more, many married women routinely do not report violence meted out by their partners, taking it to be normal. This trend is not peculiar to Kenya. In Uganda, according to one study, 30 per cent of women reported regularly expe­riencing violence from their partners. Half of the women, however, saw the violence as culturally acceptable.