• Judiciary staff – male and female - are suffering in silence.
• The judiciary has no formal sexual harassment policy – still in draft form.
A female court clerk was once called to help a judge to put on a robe only to find the man with no shirt on.
She felt that it was inappropriate but she lacked courage to face the judge. She later complained to a female registrar.
The registrar withdrew her from the judge, but the judge insisted she was the clerk he preferred.
A magistrate who attempted to expose the judge's despicable behaviour was transferred 400 kilometres from the station.
The registrar says the complaint was never investigated beyond that point and it was the woman magistrate who ended up being reprimanded via the transfer.
Another employee narrated how she put her foot down and never answered calls from a judge "who had a crush on her".
She was a resident magistrate and the judge would call repeatedly with conversations filled with sexual undertones.
“When we were to go for a meeting, he described how he’d buy wine, lingerie and be a guest in his room,” she said in a survey.
In another scenario, an employee complained of a colleague who kept sending her pornographic messages on WhatsApp.
The same person was reported for touching another woman’s hair and attempting to rape an intern in the chambers after locking the door.
The complaint never went through the official channels as the officer who received it did not want to follow up.
In yet another case, a magistrate was almost transferred far from her workstation for turning down a sexual proposition by a senior judicial officer.
She was told “you will have it really rough in the Judiciary” but she luckily escaped after the transfer was cancelled.
A court clerk attached to a judge also narrated how her boss grabbed her in his office and kept telling her how he loved girls from her community.
“The following morning he again grabbed me and I pushed him away. I called his superior – he laughed. I told a female colleague – she also laughed. ‘You didn’t know,’ she asked ‘did you do anything?”
These are just but a few incidents reported in the latest gender audit of the Judiciary by the National Gender and Equality Commission (NGEC).
The audit report was recently signed for adoption by NGEC chairperson Joyce Mutinda and Chief Justice David Maraga.
Judiciary staff - both male and female - are suffering in silence as the ogre of sexual harassment continues to consume them within the court corridors.
The audit shows that employees report bullying and sexual harassment in significant numbers but complaints are rarely filed or successfully addressed.
Worse off for the perpetrators is that the crime goes on unabated at the level of senior managers.
"It is wrong but what do we do? It is very hard if it is someone very high up like in the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court," an employee says.
In the report, at least 17 per cent of staff reported having suffered inappropriate comments on their appearance, physical invitations, and suggestive advances.
Overall, 32.8 per cent of Judiciary employees said a colleague’s behaviour has made them uncomfortable.
Some 24.2 per cent said they have felt bullied or harassed because of their gender.
In what shows that not only women are targeted, about 31.6 per cent of those who felt targeted were male.
Of the specific sexual harassment cases, 30.4 per cent were male and 69.6 per cent were female.
“The common assumption that only males carry out inappropriate, bullying or sexually harassing behaviour is not borne out,” the report reads.
“In addition, 0.6 per cent of employees, all female, labelled their experience as being threatened or sexual violence.”
The report shows that while no man was threatened or experienced sexual violence, men did experience every other type of inappropriate behaviour.
Of employees who say they felt uncomfortable, bullied or sexually harassed, 40.8 per cent say the perpetrator was not senior to them.
Some 56.1 per cent say the perpetrator was senior to them while 3.1 per cent did not know if the person was senior to them.
The commission states it is possible that the figures are under-reported as employees feared the anonymous survey could be traced back to them.
Worse still, the auditors raised the flag that some managers claim to have no knowledge of existence of sexual harassment.
“When subordinates perceive that their superiors have chosen to ignore sexual harassment, it allows it to go on unabated, either by default or design,” NGEC warns.
“Even when sexual harassment is reported, there is a tendency on the part of managers to handle it informally without going through any formal disciplinary mechanism.”
The audit has also flagged Judiciary’s failure to create a formal plan or a framework for achieving gender parity in its senior leadership positions.
“The Judiciary did not have a policy addressing the use of affirmative action so that it could be applied consistently when warranted.”
Gender-based accommodation for litigants was largely employee-initiated and not consistently practiced across all courts, the auditors observed.
The Judiciary has no formal sexual harassment policy – still in draft form.
The last formal effort was a memo by former DCJ Kalpana Rawal who then asked that cases be reported to her.
Edited by A.N