THE WAR ON WOMEN

On March 8, Kenyan women held a demonstration to protest the rising cases of femicide in the country to mark the International Women’s Day. They demanded that the growing number of women being murdered be declared a crisis.

The demo was organised by Femicides in Kenya, a women rights group led by Vivian Ouya. The women petitioned the Office of the President, the Judiciary and Parliament to declare femicide a national emergency and for government officials linked to the murder of women be sacked.

Every day an average of 137 women across the world are killed by an intimate partner or a family member, an average of five women every 60 minutes according to a 2018 report by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

This report also showed that 87,000 women were killed intentionally in 2017, with 30,000 of these killings, or more than a third of the women killed, dying at the hands of their current or former intimate partners. It shows women are most at risk in their own homes.

In Kenya, 84 women at the time this article was published have been killed by their significant others in the first 10 months of 2019.

These women have been killed by their husbands, boyfriends or intimate partners. The number could be higher as this number is culled from news reports, meaning that some could have gone unreported.

Most of these murders of women in Kenya are perpetrated by intimate partners in a phenomenon referred to as femicide.

Dead Serious

Wangechi, a medical student at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, was walking out of the hospital from a shift when an alleged stalker hacked her to death.

Kenya, like many countries in Africa, has a worryingly high prevalence of intimate partner violence, and women run the highest risk of being killed by an intimate partner with a rate of 1.7 murders per 100,000 people.

A worrying correlation in many Kenyan femicide stories is that these murders are committed by partners or ex-partners, and are an escalation of ongoing abuse, threats and sexual violence.

Violence against women continues despite existing laws, policies and regulations aimed at preventing all forms of violence against women.

These incidences of domestic violence which exponentially increase in magnitude and frequency can escalate into femicide unless checked.

In Kenya, 45 percent of women aged between 15-49 have experienced physical violence of any kind, with the main perpetrators being intimate partners.

It is Mostly Someone you know

These women not only bear the brunt of domestic violence, but they also disproportionately bear the health and psychological burdens as well.

An estimated 35% of women worldwide experience violence from their intimate partners during their lifetime, and the likelihood of femicide is greatly increased in situations where domestic violence is common, according to the World Health Organisation.

Additionally, a preliminary report of an ongoing study by WHO and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) indicates that 35% of all murders of women globally are committed by an intimate partner.

The report defines femicide as “the intentional murder of women, usually perpetrated by men, but in some instances, female family members may be involved."

Femicide differs from male homicide, as most cases of femicide are committed by current or former intimate partners, and involve ongoing abuse in the home, threats or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where women have less power or fewer resources than their partner, the WHO/LSHTM report adds.

Majority of the Victims of Domestic Violence are Women

Kenyan women are all at risk from domestic violence irrespective of their level of education, marital status, economic status, religion or region, as data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics shows.

A sampling of data from the Gender Violence Recovery Centre (GVRC) at the Nairobi Women’s hospital confirms the risk that women face from intimate partners.

“Eight out of 10 of the victims attended to at our Centre are women. In all these instances, the women were assaulted by their partners,” a 2017 report by the Gender Violence Recovery Centre says. Rebecca Gitau, the medical and psychosocial support services manager at the GVRC centre says the hospital attended to 1,129 cases of women assaulted by their intimate partners in 2017.

Young women—those aged between 25-35 years— are most at risk with majority of those seeking medical attention at the GVRC. Most of the victims seek treatment for injuries ranging from bruises, cuts, lacerations to more severe burns, fractures and deep cuts that require specialised inpatient care.

The Underlying Issues

The UNODC report indicates that the killing of women by an intimate partner was not a spontaneous but rather a culmination of previous incidents of gender-based violence.

Jealousy and fear of abandonment, infidelity suspicions featured as some of the motives for the killing. This has been cited as the motive behind Ivy Wangechi’s murder. In majority of the cases, the women are in an abusive relationship where they suffer physical or psychological abuse or both.

“We all have a choice whether to react violently or not, whatever the provocation,” says Steve Mbuthia, a professional life coach who specialises in problem-solving skills.

Gender-based violence has become 'normal'

University of Nairobi sociologist Dr Mumbi Machera attributes the rise in gender related homicide to society’s normalisation of domestic violence. This is what happened to Beryl Adhiambo Ouma.

For four hours, Beryl's neighbours ignored her screams and cries for help while her husband of four years beat her with a belt at their home in Kahawa Sukari. The neighbours dismissed the assault as usual “domestic quarrels”, and did not respond as they did not want to "interfere.”

“We see statistics of women murdered every day, we get agitated for few days and soon enough it is back to business as usual. Even the police loath to take action as they consider such incidents as mambo ya nyumbani (domestic issues) and usually ask the victims to go home and seek reconciliation from the wazee (elders)”, says Steve Mbuthia, a certified life skills coach.

Dr Mumbi Machera an international gender consultant and lecturer and University of Nairobi's Sociology Department also links the violence to the deteriorating mental health, and the lack of facilities and specialists to address this issues.

“Due to factors such as chronic drug abuse and stress, there are more cases of mental conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety, and these are likely to manifest in the home as unprovoked acts of violence,” says Dr Machera.

Women are taught to endure pain and some stay in abusive relationships that eventually lead to their deaths at the hands of their intimate partners.

In a statement sent to newsrooms following the murder of Ivy Wangechi, the Center for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW), Executive Director Wangechi Wachira condemned normalisation of violence against women on social media and other public spaces terming it as dehumanisation of the victims and as being insensitive to their legacy and the trauma of those affected.

Timeline of Femicide in 2019

Socialisation and the power imbalance between men and women, Dr Machera adds, is a major contributing factor to the growing number of femicide cases.

"African society has portrayed masculinity as strength, roughness and aggression," she states.

She added: "This kind of socialisation has especially played a role in the high number of cases of domestic violence against women by normalising the behaviour".  

A lot needs to be done in order to tackle the problem of violence against women that is now morphing into killings. What is clear, however, is that this is a manifestation of deep-seated societal issues that will likely take a long time before they are fully understood and resolved.

Until then, it seems, this worrying trend will likely continue unabated.