- Fear of police brutality and forced quarantine during the early days of the pandemic kept survivors from seeking help, the report states.
- Women and girls living in precarious economic conditions were particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse.
Image: MAGDALINE SAYA
A human rights organisation has slammed the government for failing to arrest a sharp increase in gender-based violence especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The latest report states that Kenyan authorities failed to anticipate and properly plan for the risk of increased sexual and gender-based violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a lot of suffering among the women and girls.
The latest report, “‘I had nowhere to go’: Violence against women and girls during the Covid-19 pandemic in Kenya,” was released by Human Rights Watch on Tuesday.
This survey was conducted between June 2020 and July this year with 26 interviews done.
Thirteen survivors of gender-based violence, six NGOs representatives including service providers and community activists, four parents and a relative of girl survivors, a Kenyan expert on gender-based violence and two government officials from POLICARE and the State Department for Gender Affairs were interviewed.
Most interviews were conducted by telephone or videoconferencing in order to ensure safe social distancing amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the report, fear of police brutality and forced quarantine during the early days of the pandemic kept survivors from seeking help.
As a result, many women felt they had no choice but to stay home with their abusers, rather than seek help and face the heavy-handed police or other security officials enforcing the curfew.
“Police corruption, lack of police capacity to conduct investigations, and interference in and mishandling of cases by police, severely reduced survivors’ ability to seek justice,” the report states.
“In some cases, the police required survivors to investigate and manage evidence related to their abuse, such as by producing witnesses. The police failed to effectively coordinate with and support survivors to seek prosecution of abusers, often leading the survivors to abandon the effort,” it adds.
Image: MAGDALINE SAYA
The report states that majority of survivors did not report the abuse to the authorities, and those who did, received inadequate health and legal services and faced many challenges to getting help.
The report notes that despite the government setting up GBV hotlines such as 1195 and 116 specifically for children, the government initially failed to include hotline staff in the list of essential service providers exempt from curfew restrictions.
“Normally the 1195 Hotline is operational 24 hours a day and seven days a week. However, during the early phases of the pandemic it was closed during the latter part of the day and through the night,” the report reads.
Further, it was established that government programmes that sought to provide Covid-19 support such as an expanded cash transfer programme targeting the vulnerable, had little impact on survivors of GBV and reached only a small percentage of the population in need.
According to the report, women and girls living in precarious economic conditions were particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse.
Girls interviewed said they experienced ongoing sexual harassment from men in their communities, some who, for example, lured them with gifts of food or sanitary pads that their parents could not buy for them.
According to the report, the national GBV Hotline 1195 began experiencing a large increase in calls at the beginning of lockdown in March, with call volume skyrocketing to a staggering 301 per cent increase between March and April 2020.
The hotline received about 1,100 cases in June 2020 compared to 86 in February 2020.
Reported cases dropped since then to 810 cases in September 2020, but the total number of calls was still four times higher than during the same period in 2019, it says.
The national hotline also struggled to cope with the increase in GBV-related calls, and under-staffing was compounded by a lack of available services to which it could refer callers.
“The pandemic is not the first time Kenya has witnessed increases in violence against women and girls during crises,”Agnes Odhiambo said during the release of the report.
Odhiambo is the senior women’s rights researcher and head of the Nairobi office at Human Rights Watch.
“The government should have anticipated such an increase, but tragically as in the past, it turned a blind eye and failed to protect women and girls against violence,” she added.
Similarly, the report points out the critical lack of shelters, safe houses, support centres, including infrastructure that provides survivor-centered case management and individualised, ongoing psychosocial support services for survivors of GBV in Kenya.
The report has called on the government to develop and implement a strategy for civilian protection, and prioritise specific measures to protect women and girls, as well as men and boys, against sexual and GBV ahead of the 2022 General Election.
This includes specific arrangements for detailed risk analysis, prevention, mitigation, and response, particularly in health, and security planning by police and other state security.
-Edited by SKanyara