At first, the assailants of the brutal gang rape of a 16-year-old girl were let off the hook after they mowed the lawn of a local police station. Now, nearly two years after the schoolgirl was left bloodied and battered in a sewage latrine, three of the men who raped her have been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
It took nearly two years and a global petition to win justice for the girl who has become known only as Liz after the Kenyan press began to use the pseudonym to protect her identity. More than 1.8 million people from around the world signed a petition calling on Kenya’s police inspector general to arrest and prosecute the men who were let off so easily. Kenyan laws mandate a minimum 15-year sentence for sexual violence.
“The fact that Liz’s case took so long to reach this point — and still faced serious obstacles despite strong national and global support — illustrates the injustices that are still suffered by survivors in a criminal justice system in transition,” Kimberly Brown, who worked on the case through women’s rights organization Equality Now said in a statement to ThinkProgress. “While Kenya boasts one of the most progressive legal and policy frameworks for addressing sexual violence, Liz’s case and countless others have revealed significant failures of local authorities to adequately address sexual violence.”
Liz was a seventh grade student with dreams of being a CEO when she was brutally raped and thrown her into a 20 feet deep latrine. She sufffered from a broken spine, confining her wheelchair bound and an obstetric fistula — a tear in her vaginal wall that made her unable to control the flow of her urine or excrement.
According to a 2010 survey by UNICEF, 30 percent of women in Kenya between the ages of 18 and 24 have incurred some form of sexual violence before they turned 18. A Nairobi-based crime scene investigation organization, estimated in 2008 that 19 out of 20 rapes in Kenya are not reported and are therefore go unpunished.
Kenyan women have been speaking out against these crimes in droves in recent months. Thousands of woman took to the streets of Kenya and banded together under the hashtag #MyDressMyChoice after a woman was stripped at a Nairobi bus stop by men who said the skirt she was wearing was “tempting them.” In subsequent reports, many men admitted that they felt justified in sexual violence against women they felt were dressed provocatively.
Beyond a pervasive rape culture, Liz’s case exemplified another worrying phenomenon: an appallingly lax response to crimes of sexual violence even after reporting the crime and pointing out the perpetrators to police since she recognized some of them from her village.
Liz’s case drew ire after the Nairobi-based news outlet Daily Nation wrote a detailed account of the violence wrought against her, which documents not only the violence Liz suffered but also the negligence she was met with on the part of local police officers. That article, by Njeri Rugene, is a striking indictment of the system of justice:
When she was rescued, for instance, she was taken to the Tingolo Administration Police Camp to record a statement.
As luck would have it, villagers frog-marched the three suspects she had identified while she was still at the camp. But her relief at the arrest of the three quickly turned out to be a disappointment.
“The three, for some strange reason, were only ordered to cut grass around the police camp and set free shortly after,” says Liz’s mother. “In the meantime, the police told me to take the girl home so that she could take a shower before taking her to hospital.”
At Musibiriri Dispensary, with one of the culprit’s mother in tow, the medic on duty could only prescribe painkillers for Liz. Then mother and daughter went back home to nurse their respective pains.
And now, satisfied that their crime would be swept under the carpet, all the attackers have returned to roam the village. As if their presence is not harrowing enough, some of them and their parents continue to harass and intimidate Liz and her family, says her mother.
“They often call purporting to find out how she is faring. They promise to give us something small for medical expenses and then go under until the next call,” she says, singling out one instance where the father of one of the suspects humiliated her husband when he went to the man’s home to collect some money he had been promised to help take Liz to hospital.
“He angrily sent him off shouting that the crime was committed by a group, not just his son,’’ she says.
“My wish is to see justice done,” Liz told the Daily Nation while sobbing. “I want my attackers arrested and punished.”
Now she has — although not fully. Only three of attackers were tried. The other three remain at large, although warrants for their arrests were issued a full year ago.