RIGHTS-KENYA: Child Abuse Sparks Debate on Castration

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Dec 22 2003 (IPS) - Recent demands by women legislators to have rapists castrated have sparked a debate that has left rights groups in Kenya divided.

The campaigns heightened when a group of eight women members of parliament (Kenya has 18 women legislators) visited a four-year-old girl, who survived a vicious rape by a 22-year-old man over two weeks ago. The man, whose rape of the minor has sparked national outrage, has been sentenced to life imprisonment.

The girl will undergo two operations to correct the damage inflicted by the rapist, doctors say.

Speaking from her hospital bed in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, the visibly shaken and tearful legislators demanded that men who defiled and raped children or women should be castrated.

– This is a terrible thing. The men who do this should just be castrated,” remarked Beth Mugo, leader of the delegation. She believes castration will serve as a deterrent to would-be offenders and reduce the cases of rape.

Jane Kiragu agrees. ôThe total disrespect of the female gender is beyond words. And with the increasing number of rape cases, we may need to look at the whole question of castration. With women and girls being maimed for life in the hands of rapists, castration is something that should be considered,” says Kiragu, executive director of the Kenya chapter of the Federation of Women Lawyers.

According to her, the castration, if backed by tough laws on sexual violence, will render rape as a thing of the past.

A draft Bill, titled ‘Sexual Violence Draft Bill’, compiled by the Federation of Women Lawyers, has been handed to Attorney General, Amos Wako, for consideration. Sources at the Attorney General’s office say the Bill is still being studied.

ôOur challenge for next year is to lobby the Attorney General to pass the Bill into law,” Kiragu says. The Bill deals, among others, with known or suspected paedophiles.

But the calls to have the rapists’ genitalia removed have not gone down well with some gender activists in Kenya.

ôCastration may not be the solution. We need to look at the root cause of the problem and address it. Some of the rapists may be under the influence of drugs, while others may have been sodomised when they were small,” notes Hilda Mawanda, of the ‘Coalition of Violence Against Women’, a non-governmental organisation based in Nairobi.

Mawanda says, ôWe should first study the background of offender and where he comes from. After which, the next step will easily be mapped out”. Her organisation has handled about 34 cases of rape since Jan. this year.

‘Men for Gender Equality Now’, a Nairobi-based movement which promotes gender equality, is also opposed to the idea of castration of rapists, describing it as gross human rights violations.

In a telephone interview with IPS, chairperson Daniel Mbekar said, ôWe disagree with this idea completely. There are other ways of intervention. We are soon coming up with a number of measures to be presented to the floor (parliament) for debate.”

Others also are not so sure about castration. ôCastration may deter potential rapists but does not help in a case where one has already committed the crime. Life imprisonment would teach him a lesson,” observers Faiza Mohammed, director of ‘Equality Now’, an organisation working to eliminate violence and discrimination against women.

According to her, there has been an improvement in government’s efforts to tighten laws surrounding rape.

In July, the government passed the ‘Criminal Law Amendment Act’, which seeks to tighten the penalty for rape and defilement of girls from a maximum of 14 years imprisonment to a maximum of life sentence.

But, critics say the act needs further tightening since it does not stipulate the minimum sentence. ôThis has been left to the discretion of the magistrate who can decide to jail the rapist even for a month or put him on probation,” notes Mawanda.

In fact, the number of rape and defilement cases has been growing steadily in the past three years. In 2001 it stood at 1,987 compared to 2,005 in 2002 and 2,055 this year, according to Attorney General Wako. But campaigners maintain the figures could be higher as the majority of survivors do not report due to fear of stigmatisation.

Over 40 percent of all Kenyan girls raped do not report to anyone, according to ‘Population Communication Africa’, a non-governmental organisation that researches on sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls.

Rights groups have attributed the increasing cases of sexual violence on girls and women to economic and social pressure, as well as to increased levels of alcohol abuse and breakdown of societal values, which were previously held to ensure security of the woman and girl child.