It would seem the man of today is a walking target. Rape is a possibility. Gone are the days when men got drunk, slept on verandahs and roadside ditches, and woke up in one piece. Long gone are also the days when men walked home in the wee hours of the morning. Nowadays, the man who walks in the dead of the night is at risk of being sodomised.
Alan and Robert carry the horrors of a night gone awry. They are victims of sodomy. Robert was raped on the night of June 1, 2022, while Alan was violated on the night of March 26, 2022.
Robert says that he was walking to his car in Nakuru town at around 3 am after leaving a club when the ordeal happened. “I was very drunk and wanted to sleep it off in my car. I took the wrong turn and found myself in a dark alley,” he says. He stumbled and fell and subsequently blacked out.
“I woke up about two hours later, with lots of pain around my anal area and streaks of drying blood,” he says. “I was covered in gunny bags and cartons.” He says that his assaulters stole his phone, and some money, but left behind his credit cards and car keys.
But despite the pain, Robert has never disclosed to anyone what happened on that night.
“I sought private medical assistance and took Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) medications for a month,” he says. Robert, who is single says that since that incident, he has kept off alcohol and relationships. “I have become reclusive. I have also become exceedingly afraid and ashamed of having sex. My arousal and libido are affected. I no longer feel like a man anymore,” says Robert, who is in his 30s.
38-year-old Alan’s experience shadows that of Robert. He was walking home from work at around 11.30 pm when he was attacked and gang raped in Kiambu County.
“I was accosted by four men. They were in what looked like puffy coats, masks and toques,” says Alan. One of the men called him by name. “He knew me. He said I would live if I did what they said. They asked for money. I had Sh800 which was dismissed as not enough to let me go,” he says. He was beaten senseless and dragged to a maize plantation where the four men took turns on him. Alan lost consciousness.
Like Robert, Alan did not report the incident saying he was too ashamed. “Whenever someone reports that they have been raped and records a statement, the police leak their identity to the media and everyone in town knows they are a victim. You become a laughing stock. No woman wants to date you and no man wants to be seen with you. I didn’t want everyone in my village to know that I had been raped. It was too humiliating,” he says. He adds that instead, he crawled to his home and sought medical attention the following day.
According to research, adult male rape victims rarely turn to the legal, medical, or mental health systems for assistance. Personal stories of male rape mirror female rape in terms of a sense of shame, humiliation, and self-blame, but males are even less likely than females to report an assault.
“A common theme emerging in treating male rape victims is a lost sense of manliness. Male victims voice their concern in reconciling their masculine identity with their experience of being raped,” notes the study titled ‘Male Rape: The Silent Victim and the Gender of the Listener’ by Patrizia Riccardi.
This is true for John Omondi who was gang-raped by his friends in July 2016 at Umoja estate, Nairobi, during a birthday party. When he went to the police station to report that he had been raped, the police officers took his statement lightly, mocked and sneered at him. “They laughingly asked what I had been doing at the party and why I couldn’t fight or scream for help yet I am a man,” he says. According to psychologist Ken Munyua, this type of humiliation is aggravated when the gender desk has female police officers only.
“Because of the way our society is culturally modelled, a man who has been gang-raped and is seeking to report will most likely change his mind if he finds a woman officer manning the gender desk as opposed to a male officer,” he says.
Only 79 men in the whole country were reported to the police for sodomising other men according to the Economic Survey 2022 which comprises the latest data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 2021. Between 2017 and 2021, only a total of 377 men were reported to the police for raping other men.
John Chege, the senior programs and development officer at the Gender Violence Recovery Centre (GVRC) at Nairobi Womens Hospital, says that the men who go to the facility hardly want to go beyond treatment. “We have recovery options that include group therapy. However, we have noticed that the majority of men want nothing beyond physical treatment,” Chege says while noting that sexually abused men make up 4 per cent of an average of 3,000 cases annually.
In addition, many find it humiliating to discuss rape. “The number of sodomised victims keeps rising but the majority find it very humiliating to open up,” psychologist Munyua says.
This is echoed by Chege who says that male victims present with a lost sense of manliness. “There’s a lot of social prejudice against men who are raped; some of which include questions on their masculinity such as ‘You’re a man, how could you let this happen?’ and suggestive connotations about how their looks precipitated the rape such as ‘You look like a woman, what did you expect?’” says Chege. He adds that male victims are afraid that people will not believe their story even if they came out and spoke about it.
The inability to be open about rape is also part of the fuel that pushes rapists to target men. Munyua suggests that if a man sets out to rape another man, he will most likely be aware that the chances of getting reported, arrested, and sent to jail will be very low.
“If this predator rapes, he knows that the raped man will have the burden of proof to prove as opposed to a woman who will have the full backing of the society behind her,” Munyua notes.
Within this silence and condemnation, Munyua says that there are some victims of rape who organize for other men to get raped or who end up becoming rapists as a way to get even. “This usually happens at house parties,” says Munyua.
Rape among men does not only start in adulthood. Most of it occurs in high schools for boys where boarding is mandatory. Munyua says that over the close to two decades of practising psychology, he has observed that out of all the high school boys who present with suicidal ideation, more than 30 per cent have been molested sexually by men or fellow male students.
One of these incidents recently occurred at Lelu Secondary School in Kipkelion East Constituency, Kericho County. In the last term of the 2022 academic calendar, a 14-year-old Form One boy was reportedly sodomised by a fellow student. A police report indicated that he was sodomised by a fellow student. The boy had gone to the toilet when he was attacked. He kept quiet about the incident and reported it to his mother when schools closed. He was taken to the hospital where he was treated and discharged.
Munyua says that it is also during the turbulent high school years, circumcision periods, and the transition from boyhood to adulthood that a boy who has been exposed to sodomy might assume a gay identity.
Male predators who go out to rape other men do not always do it out of the blue. There are certain signals they pick on when isolating their victims.
According to Kiyo Ng’ang’a, a criminologist and a security practitioner at Armistice Security Consult International (ASCI), most perpetrators follow the victim precipitation theory when planning and executing their attacks. “A criminal could single out a victim because the victim is behaving in a manner that increases the risk of attack,” he says. “This implies that, sometimes, victims of sodomy may contribute to their own victimisation.” For example, adds Kiyo, if someone drinks alcohol and walks alone at night, or sleeps in the streets and roadside ditches, they may be more likely to be victimised than those who drink and go home with their buddies.
In November 2022, the authorities raised alarm over increased cases of sodomy in Karap, Sigira, Chemoiben, and Singorwet areas in Bomet Central Constituency. The victims in these cases were mostly drunk men returning home late at night. This red alert was raised after a suspected rapist waylaid a 33-year-old drunk man, dragged him to his house, and raped him for hours.
The rapists don't always stop after the act of rape. In some cases, they go as far as murder. In March 2023, homicide detectives drawn from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations launched investigations after the body of a man was discovered in Nyahururu town. The man had been sodomised before he was killed and dumped in a back street.
In other instances, it could be as subtle as a light comment that the predator finds you attractive and 'rape-able'. This is usually passed as a joke to test the waters. For instance, Omondi recalls that the man who orchestrated his rape ordeal had at one time suggested that Omondi was so cute that he could rape him someday. Many men take this as a rough joke.
Where the victims of sodomy are boys, the perpetrators will tend to be men the boys are familiar with. These may range from uncles, fathers to teachers. In June 2022, a teacher at Mosoriot Academy was arrested after raping three boys aged between 11 and 13 years. The teacher, Bernard Kirui, had allegedly shifted from his official house to the boys' dormitory where he slept. Detectives at Konoin Police Station said that Kirui was arrested after one of the boys complained of severe pain in his bottom. The boy was taken to hospital where it was established that he had been sodomised.
Many rapists are sadists, looking for their own pleasure. However, Sociologist Christina Chanya Lenjou says that this type of crime motivation will vary from case to case. “For instance, whereas sexual release might be a cause, it is hardly the major reason why men rape other men even in confined places such as male prisons,” says Christina. One of the primary reasons is to assert dominance. According to Christina, a man who psychologically feels inclined to dominate other men might use rape as a tool to exercise power and demean others. Christina says that in a confined prison setting, it is not the prisoners who have spent considerable time behind bars who are likely to be raped, but the new ones who are perceived as fresh fish. In such an instance, rape is used as a way to assert dominance and subjugate new victims.
Christina points out that where sodomy occurs among younger men and boys, the motive could also be bullying or a consequence of sexual interactions within their circles. She notes that men who rape other men are not always gay. “Rape between men is not necessarily about sexual orientation. The rapist could be heterosexual. However, men in the LGBTQ category are more likely to be sexually assaulted by fellow men including by heterosexual men.
With the highlights that LGBTQ has been garnering and the stigma associated with it, Chege says that more men who are recovering from rape are afraid that they will be subjected to homophobic backlash associated with male-to-male intercourse even though they are victims of rape. “The fear of being linked with homosexuality and the stigma is partially driving men into silence,” he says.
Christina also says that cultural processes in society have become permissive to maladaptive tendencies. “We are at an era where our society is playing catch-up and adapting to customs that were previously considered alien such as same-sex relationships. In this shift, it is easy for unguided boys to assume certain practices such as sexual molestation of fellow boys,” she says.
She adds that at an age where the young generation has access to digital devices and the internet, pornography has become more proliferated. “A group of young boys in the school dormitory can log in to a porn site where the gross portrayal of sexual relationships including gang rape and sodomy is available. The risk is that they might assume this is normal and start perpetrating it,” she says.
According to Munyua, the first step in arresting the ghost of sodomy lies in equal awareness of the rights of both male and female genders. “Whereas the empowerment of girls is paramount, it should be done in tandem with the empowerment of boys. This will start to shift the society from the ‘don’t care’ attitude towards male gender abuse issues,” he says. Munyua says that if society were to become more accepting and empathetic towards abused and raped men, more men would be willing to seek help as well as raise their voices in advocacy. “We need to shift from the current trend where men and in particular the boy child feels neglected and out of option when aggrieved,” he says.
Chege concurs. He says that there is an urgent need for mass de-stigmatisation of sexual abuse against male victims. “The society needs to acknowledge and understand that men are suffering from rape and they need help,” says Chege. "This awareness can largely focus on high schools and universities where a majority of cases are coming from," he notes.
7.4 per cent: Abused men who report sexual violence in contrast to 15.2 per cent of women
121 boys: Number of boys below 11 years sexually abused. 87 boys between 12 to 17 years were also reported to be sexually abused in Nairobi in the year 2022
Nearest hospital / Health facility Mental 360: +254 776543099 or [email protected] USIKIMYE: 0718158400 or [email protected] Gender-Based Violence Recovery Centre: [email protected] Gender Resilience Initiative: 0722 732 058 or 0736 197 719 Kenya Police: 112 / 911/ 999
According to security consultant Kiyo Ng’ang’a, a majority of cases of sodomy occur when the victims are feeling safe and unsuspecting amongst their predators. He says that men who rape other men utilise the element of surprise to subdue their victim. In some cases, they intoxicate to cloud judgment. To protect yourself, Kiyo lists the following steps:
Do not engage with persons who take drugs. Do not take alcohol in places you would normally not feel safe and without the presence of your trusted friends. Never leave your drink unattended especially at parties to avoid being spiked. Once you arrive at a party, evaluate possible escape routes. Be aware of your surroundings at all times. Do not make assumptions on your safety. Know what's happening around you at all times. Assess your entire environment, anticipate danger and be ready to take your next action if threatened. If you sense danger, evacuate as fast as possible. If you find yourself in danger, fight - If you can't fight, run, if you can't run scream. Defend yourself at all costs.
