It’s 2025, expose sex offenders and let children be children
Kenya has recently witnessed an increase in cases of violence against women and children.
What you need to know:
- Unicef’s 2019 Violence Against Children Survey found that one in six females experienced childhood sexual violence, with up to 62.6 per cent of them experiencing it multiple times before the age of 18.
- My experience, however, means that each time I see a judge’s decision favouring a perpetrator in a defilement case, my blood boils with rage and indignation.
If someone asked me to describe the graphic details of my primary school teacher touching me inappropriately, I would probably be too traumatised to do so, even though the memory lives rent-free in my head. Even the smell of this shirt still lingers in my nose sometimes in unexpected moments and it nauseates me.
Throughout my teens, I received unwanted attention from grown men, including some family friends, which I was ill-equipped to stop. I remember one family friend asking me to hug him and write him a love letter, and yet another, a youth pastor, inviting me to stay back in his office one day after the youth service “just to talk”. In my teenage wisdom, I turned down both invitations simply by ignoring them, but I could have ended up being just another statistic in defilement cases.
I’m one of the lucky ones whose story is not horrific. According to Unicef’s 2019 Violence Against Children Survey, one in six females experienced childhood sexual violence, with up to 62.6 per cent of them experiencing it multiple times before the age of 18.
My experience, however, means that each time I see a judge’s decision favouring a perpetrator in a defilement case, my blood boils with rage and indignation. That’s exactly what happened when I read a triggering article in the Nation in December 2024 where a judge ruled that a 16-year-old spending night with man isn't proof of defilement. The perpetrator had been sentenced to 15 years in prison by a lower court, but Justice Anthony Ndung'u set him free after the girl told the court that she had consensual intercourse with the man. It gets worse, because the judge “also relied on previous High Court judgments, which said that the defiled party has to describe the ordeal as ‘graphically’ as possible to convince the court.”
Read: A father's horror: How poverty and religious manipulation enabled years of child abuse in Kilifi
Sexual harassment and sexual violence are about power, not consent. And in this dynamic, where one person was an adult and the other a child, how can consent even be part of the discussion? Is it because this society values patriarchy more than the welfare of children?
That aside, a victim of defilement would hardly be able to describe those graphic details of such an ordeal, as this would retraumatise and trigger them, so why put them through something like that?
There have been previous attempts in Kenya to lower the consent age from 18 to 16, which were thwarted, as they would have rubbished the gains we’ve made in gender equality. There’s nothing to be gained by asking a child to make a decision about sex and sexuality. In fact, the focus should be on comprehensive sexuality education, as this would be more empowering, and would help them secure a healthier future.
Can we agree to let children be children in 2025 and beyond and stop siding with child abusers?
The writer comments on social and gender topics (@FaithOneya; [email protected]).
