Femicide report: How can you castrate a female sex offender?
President William Ruto receives the Report of the Technical Working Group on Gender-Based Violence, including Femicide, from the chairperson, Dr Nancy Baraza, at State House, Nairobi.
What you need to know:
- The report requires further analysis of and critical reflection on the findings to come up with novel and clearly justified game-changing ideas.
The wanton killings of women in Kenya (popularly known as femicide) led to the presidential appointment of the Technical Working Group (TWG) on January 10, 2025, with a wide mandate to investigate the magnitude, trends, causation and consequences of gender-based violence (GBV), alongside the legal and policy frameworks and operational challenges in taming the vice. The resulting report was officially released last week.
Titled Report of the Technical Working Group on Gender-based Violence (GBV) Including Femicide, the document defines femicide as "the killing of women and girls by men because of their gender". This definition is narrow, implying that femicide can only be perpetrated by men. Is it not plausible that women can also kill their own based on gender, just as they perpetrate female genital mutilation? As well, the annexation of the term femicide to GBV seems to suggest that it is not part of the latter. Femicide is a constitutive act of GBV and should be treated as such.
The report also states that "femicide remains unrecognised as a stand-alone offence under the law", implying that there is no statute in Kenya under which it can be prosecuted. This is the basis of a recommendation to "amend the Penal Code to define and codify femicide as a distinct offence from murder". This sounds great. But of what consequence is it? Does it really matter whether the offence is called murder or femicide if it is adequately punished?
Many other issues highlighted by the report are common knowledge. They include poor access to services, negation of justice by traditional dispute resolution systems, ineffectiveness of community administrative systems, negative effects of social media, chronic underfunding of structures and services, and lack of a national data system on GBV.
One of the most visible—and radical—recommendations is to "amend the Sexual Offences Act 2006 to include chemical castration for both male and female child sex offenders", as it appears in the Executive Summary at Section 2, part "e". The syntax here suggests that children who commit sexual offences should be castrated. Could the TWG have meant to say that adults who have committed sexual offences against children should receive this kind of treatment? This is perhaps the case, going by the later proposal of chemical castration for both male and female child defilers and defilers of persons with disabilities on page 57 of the report. Whatever the case, how can a female sexual offender be castrated? And why should other sexual offenders not face the same fate?
An anachronistic recommendation is to amend the Sexual Offences Act to include "mandatory minimum sentencing and introduce strict, non-discretionary minimum sentences for aggravated sexual offences and repeat offenders". Minimum sentences already exist in the cited law. Article 3 provides for a minimum of 10 years for rape. Article 7 prescribes a minimum of 10 years for anyone who "causes penetration or indecent acts committed within the view of a family member, child or person with mental disabilities".
Article 8 provides a mandatory life sentence for defiling a child of 11 years or less, at least 20 years for defiling those aged 12 to 15, and at least 15 years for violation of children aged 16 and above.
So, what is new in the report's recommendation? Moreover, minimum sentences are problematic. Many Kenyan judges have pointed out that they contradict the principle of discretion and render judicial officers superfluous. Was the TWG aware of such concerns, or did it simply ignore them?
The section on prevention of GBV gives one international example. It reports on what Fiji intends to do as proposed in its national action plan. What Fiji has achieved would have been more informative. County-based initiatives in Kenya are cited without demonstration of how they have prevented the vice or theoretical arguments on their potential to achieve the desired results. Given the difficulty in causally linking an outcome with a preventive measure, this could be done through harvesting counterfactual perceptions of potential impacts. Measures by other countries are cited on various themes but without showing their effectiveness and why Kenya should replicate them.
There are no fewer than 85 recommendations across different chapters. Their summary into 37 under the implementation framework suggests that the TWG considered them game changers. However, what is lacking is an explanation of why they are considered so. This could have been done through a synthesis of the same into a theory of change outlining the thinking, assumptions made, envisaged results and pathways towards them.
In short, the report requires further analysis of and critical reflection on the findings to come up with novel and clearly justified game-changing ideas.
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya University ([email protected])
