Kenyans Wage a Campaign Against Domestic Abuse

Betty Kavata’s face is contorted with pain in a Nairobi hospital bed. Feeding tubes run up her nostrils and into her stomach. Every now and then, she lets out an agonized moan.

The 27-year-old Kavata, mother of an 8-year-old girl, has suffered brain damage, her doctors say. She is paralyzed from the neck down and cannot speak. Nearly all of her teeth were knocked out, and most of her hair was pulled out.

Activists say Kavata, who is married to a police officer, is one of a growing number of women who are victims of domestic abuse in a country that often accepts or condones violence and abuse of women.

The activists have launched a 16-day campaign to change that.

“We believe that women have a right to be free from violence . . . and defend themselves,” said Adelina Mwau, head of the Coalition on Violence Against Women, a national network in this East African country. “We believe that violence against women can and must end.”

This year’s campaign, which began Thursday, will include rallies condemning wife beating, video displays highlighting the issue and a mock tribunal where victims of domestic abuse will testify about their experiences before make-believe judges.

The coalition also is calling on the Kenyan government to make violence against women a crime and aggressively investigate and prosecute it. The Kenyan Federation of Women Lawyers is urging the establishment of family courts.

The federation is also pushing for a review of customs and common law that allow practices such as in-laws inheriting a woman after her husband’s death, polygamy, skipping over widows in figuring inheritance and female genital excision.

According to local media reports, the number of known cases of violence against women has risen from 2,492 in 1994, to 2,531 in 1995, to 3,674 in 1996. Numbers are hard to come by because police do not file such incidents separately from regular assault cases.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that violence against women--in particular, wife beating--continues to rise.

Psychiatrists attribute an overall increase in violence to a surge in poverty, unemployment and stress.

Anne Nyabera, who monitors women’s rights issues for the women lawyers federation, said that even though many women are reluctant to report their plight, her group receives 10 new cases a day, nine of which, on average, involve domestic abuse.

“The cases don’t come through to us until things are really bad,” she said.

“There’s social stigma attached to women coming forward and saying [they’ve] been beaten,” Nyabera said. “In many cases they are not economically empowered and are financially dependent on their husbands. There is also the religious aspect; many women feel they should be good wives.”

In other instances, male-dominated courts let violators off or give them sentences that are too lenient to serve as a deterrent, activists say.

Agnes Siyankoi Moita Risa, a Masai, made history earlier this year by suing her husband for assault--the first such case in Kenya’s tradition-conscious Masailand.

Risa told a court that her husband often battered her during their 12-year marriage, injuring her back, elbow, collarbone and legs. Her attorney said her husband tried to strangle her on many occasions.

The 32-year-old mother of four school-age children won her case. However, the judge ruled that because her husband was a first-time offender and suffering back problems, he should serve six months in jail or be fined the equivalent of about $83. He chose to pay the money.

Nyabera said the legal system “is extremely hostile toward women, straight from going to the police station to the courts.”

Though suspended from his job as a police officer, Kavata’s husband has been neither arrested nor charged.

One woman who did summon the courage to leave her husband is Lenah Kadeya, a 27-year-old nurse and mother of five. After more than a decade of abuse, she walked out after he assaulted her in front of his mother, who refused to intervene.

“He beat me because I didn’t iron his shirt, but there was no electricity on our estate; and because I didn’t polish his shoes, but there was no polish in the house,” Kadeya said.

Kadeya said she realized that “there was no one else who can change my life other than me.” Other women also should break their silence about abuse, she said, because “keeping it back in their homes won’t solve any problems.”