He dragged me into a bush and raped me...

Gladys Atieno looks at her six-year-old son with awe, pride, and admiration. She loves the little boy, she says, and watching him grow brings her “a joy that I can never trade for anything”.

That motherly joy and pride, however, can suddenly turn into heartache and regret because Gladys was never prepared to become a mother.

The little son she loves so much was conceived after a rape that occurred after she suffered an epileptic seizure. He is, therefore, a constant reminder of a crime against her person, a testament to the unprovoked bestiality of man.

On that fateful October 2007 afternoon, Gladys was heading to Lumbango township in Siaya County when she got the epilepsy attack. “I was feeling alright even though I had not taken my medicines that day,” she says. “My health was okay. I had not been hit by a seizure in the previous few weeks and didn’t think that I would have one then.”

She had not gone far when she began to feel drowsy and then this feeling that something was welling up inside her stomach and inching up her throat made her feel disoriented. The seizure was coming and within seconds, it captured her and threw her to the ground.

Minutes later, Gladys came to with an intense pain in her lower abdomen. Unknown to her, a man passing by had seen her suffer the attack, pounced on her, and dragged her to a nearby bush just as she was recovering from the convulsions and loss of consciousness.

“I couldn’t tell what had happened after recovering,” she says, “but I noticed that my clothes and legs were dirty as though I’d been dragged or rolled on the ground.”

Gladys, however, attributed the dirt to the convulsions she had suffered. She decided to return home and clean up. However, when she made the first few steps, sharp pain shot across her lower abdomen. And something was also not right with her private parts.

At home, she took painkillers to ease the discomfort, but it just would not go away. After a week of nauseating discomfort, Gladys went to Lumbango District Hospital for a medical test. Doctors broke the sad news: She had been raped, they informed her. And, worse, she had conceived as a result.

Still dazed by the news, Gladys went to a local police station and reported the matter. Within a week, the police came up with a list of suspects. Luckily, a man who had seen the rapist following her suspiciously came forward and identified the attacker, who was arrested, charged, and send to the cooler for the rest of his life.

Fast forward seven years later to Embu, where a man was arrested in Octover last year for raping an 18-year-old epileptic woman in Mbondoni village, Mbeere South District.

According to the prosecution, the woman had fallen down after suffering an epilepsy seizure when the accused, Simon Musyoka, pounced on her and raped her. For that, the High Court sitting in Embu handed him a 30-year jail term.

NOT ALWAYS THE CASE

These two incidents highlight the plight of Kenya’s epileptic women. Although justice may seem to have been served here, that is not always the case for many others. In a country where rape is hushed up in homesteads and villages rather than reported for prosecution, epileptic victims suffer a double blow: They cannot identify their attackers because they are usually unconscious when it all happens; and they find it difficult to report the attack in the first place.

In some cases, the resulting injuries speak for the victim. That is the sad case of a nine-year-old girl in Werugha location in Taita who is recovering in hospital after suffering serious abdominal injuries during a rape. The girl was found by villagers on the morning of January 21 this year dumped in a culvert near a river. She had been missing for three days.

“She cannot even sit or stand on her own due to the pain,” says Ms Christine Kidagho, the area assistant chief. What breaks the hearts of many, including the doctors attending to her, is that it seems the girl has been repeatedly defiled. Her mother and older sister, like her, suffer from epilepsy and so the sexual predators of her village seem to have taken advantage of the family’s woes to prey on the little girl, says Ms Kidagho.

For the more than 800,000 Kenyans living with the condition — 80 per cent of whom live in rural areas — this state of affairs is just too hard to bear. Dr Eddie Chengo, an epileptologist based in Malindi, says 20 out of every 1,000 people living in Kenya today suffer from epilepsy, and that women are more prone to injuries and sexual abuse than men.

A study conducted at Kenyatta National Hospital by Dr James Kariuki for the University of Nairobi found out that not only do women with epilepsy have to grapple with the high likelihood of abuse, they also have to deal with their fertility, which is lowered by about two-thirds by the condition compared with other women aged between 15 and 49.

Abuse of women with epilepsy often starts from an early age and becomes “systematic and internalised in the victim from an early age,” says Dr Chengo. With time, the victim begins to think that it is normal to be abused or mistreated and, therefore, hardly reports the abuse.

Women with epilepsy, however, are not only at risk of attack and abuse by strangers, but also from casual friends, acquaintances, relatives, and domestic partners. Karijn Aussems, 36, was raped by her boyfriend in her home after having a seizure.

She now works with women living with the condition and is a member of the National Epilepsy Coordination Committee. She admits that she did not report the attack to the police.

Her inaction, and that of many others like her, she says, has made it easy for young girls and women with epilepsy to be abused because they do not feel equal and worthy, and do not have the courage to speak out.

Women with epilepsy will often feel vulnerable, alone, and have very low self-esteem. This creates in them the need to feel loved and appreciated and oftentimes that void is nurtured by opportunistic men who make the women persevere sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.

Karijn, for instance, says she felt “different, alone, and incomplete. “I didn’t have many friends and my self-esteem hit rock bottom. My school performance deteriorated and my seizures increased. I was forced to drop out of school in Form Three... couldn’t even get a pass to join a polytechnic.”

She says that meeting the man who would later rape her in 1996 filled a void she had carried in her heart for ages. He made her feel special, worthy, and loved, just the kind of spark she had been yearning for. When they first met she was not attracted to him at all, but she started dating him because he showed genuine concern for her.

“I couldn’t say no,” she remembers. “I was comforted by the fact that at least he loved me... who else could?”

Dr Chengo says an abuser will know what to say to get what he wants. He will push and coerce the woman into doing things, all in the name of loving or appreciating her, and if she is resistant, he will resort to force.

Karijn concurs, saying that her abuser would push her into doing things that she did not want to do, like watching pornography and making weird suggestions, including having group sex. “He would say it was what he deserved for accepting to be my boyfriend, yet I didn’t even know where he stayed or who his close friends were. He had cut me off from his social life completely.”

If she pointed out something she did not like about him, he would cast himself as the victim in the relationship and warn her that she ought to be grateful that he accepted her “impossible” epilepsy. And then, after raping her, the man upped his constant admonition that she was difficult to love and be intimate with and that she was lucky that he was doing her a favour being with her. “I guess he made me feel guilty for his own crime such that I did not report the matter to the police,” Karijn says.

The stage for such abuse and feelings of inadequacy is usually set from a victim’s early age, when the effects of epilepsy are beginning to show. For Karijn, even though she would not fall and jerk when the seizures first started, she often looked dazed and would fumble with her clothes.

And then, whenever someone asked her a question in the presence of her mother, she would answer on her behalf. At school, her teacher would send her home to recover whenever she got a seizure, even though she could have stayed on like other children.

“I often felt like my tutor and my mother treated me unfairly and perceived me as a victim even though their intentions were well-meaning. I felt as though I had a label on my forehead saying that I had epilepsy. On the other hand, it was scary knowing that I could not trust my own body completely.”

REPORT ANY TYPE OF ABUSE

Dr Chengo advises that women with epilepsy be knowledgeable about the condition and understand that they have rights like any other person. They should report any type and form of abuse instead of keeping quiet.

The lack of a proper policy, poor drug compliance, and wide treatment gaps due to low resources have negatively affected the fight to overcome epilepsy or equip women living with the condition with the means to defend themselves in the event of sexual molestation, says Ms Sitawa Wafula, an epileptic rape victim who also suffers from bipolar syndrome. In fact, it is only after seven years of lobbying by non-governmental organisations that national guidelines for the management of epilepsy were launched earlier this year.

The photographic identities of the women we spoke to are protected for legal reasons.