The year 2020 had been anticipated as the year of great things, bigger moves and transformation but nobody was ready for how much more this was to become. Maybe it was in the alliteration of the numbers or a whole other number of reasons but suffice to say nobody got their projections for the year right. What we got was a devastating pandemic and as a feminist my first thoughts went to the most undervalued of our society, our women and girls.
This pandemic has seen this very key but highly disrespected portion of society get the brunt of the hurt, case and point being a report coming out of Machakos where some 4000 young girls were reported to be pregnant, yet this was just one county out of 47 in the entire country! This caused a huge uproar within the deeply pious and highly prudish Kenyan society, whose first instinct was to blame the young children for their circumstances without interrogating how they got there in the first place.
I was enraged. It truly does not compute how a simple thing like consent can be so misconstrued and pathologized. It got me asking myself, ‘how does sexual violence actually look like, what does the law say about it and how can we keep ourselves safe from it?’ In answering these questions, I felt my little to no experience with men as a single queer woman would be wholly insufficient and that is how GT KENYA March 2021 edition was born. It only made sense to ask these questions to the right audience who in this case was sex workers; a key population of women and girls who face if not the highest some of the highest forms of violence sexual and other than any other.
What I thought and what I found were worlds apart as I heard some of the most truly ghastly experiences of living my ears have witnessed. Stories of how one girl at the approach of curfew went into a car with a client and was found in the Ngong forest near death or let’s not even go too far. There’s a recent case of Velvine, a university student and waitress, currently in court of how she had her spine broken and genitals mutilated by a man that was very familiar to her after a night out that eventually led to her demise. Daily there’s a new story coming out and I was even further astounded to learn that this man got away because in Kenyan lodges and hotels, women are forbidden to leave the premises before the man. This is done to protect the men from being robbed and such but really, where is the protection for the women? This is why women are routinely being found in rooms destroyed, killed and further desecrated for some really futile habits and practices.
The law and healthcare is no better! Sex work is not explicitly prohibited in the Kenyan constitution but the penal code that has existed for eons and just got repealed by its creators is the same used to further oppress a people that simply want to make a living and exist without the threat of death every which way they look. So again I ask, who protects the women and children from the evil that is patriarchy? Something has got to give and we are done with it being our lives.
Nyambura Gachahi
GT Kenya coordinator
