African Woman and Child Feature Service

On a chilly Tuesday evening in 2002, Miriam Wangui was convulsed in shock after she was gang raped.

Wangui says that she was in a vehicle that got carjacked “We were carjacked sometime back in 2002 and the gang ordered all men to leave after relieving them of their valuables. I was however, held hostage and raped at gun point.

Unable to hold back tears, Miriam says, “My head was throbbing and I felt a strong urge to vomit. But nothing was coming out. And the pain was incredible. For several hours I was running unable to come to terms with the horrifying attack.

I was utterly devastated and I knew I should have acted fast to bring the culprits to book. But the road to justice wasn’t and isn’t smooth. The police station where I stopped to seek help is where it all begun to go wrong,” she said.

The officers booked her report as a robbery with violence case and never made any reference to rape. They dropped her a few meters from her home but with some advice ‘Do not tell your boyfriend or husband if you are married as they may abandon you’ they advised.

At home, she took shower and erased all the physical evidence that could have formed the basis of prosecution.

Her condition was a matter of speculation and conjecture. She finally gathered courage and went to hospital where she was diagnosed with a venereal disease.

“My world just collapsed. I could not afford the expensive drugs prescribed by a gynecologist at St Mary’s Lang’ata hospital,” she recalls as she painfully recounts the harrowing ordeal.

I resorted to drinking and in the next two and half year’s, my life was a complete mess.

She finally gathered herself and reconstructed her shattered life after attending counseling sessions at Amani Counseling Centre.

“The counseling sessions helped me a lot. Social workers made me realize my inner strength. If it wasn’t for it, I think today I would have been either mentally ill or dead,” she says.

Today, she is the proud owner of a counseling centre in Nairobi. She set up the Wangu Foundation Counseling Centre five years ago in recognition of the agony rape victims go through before they can find help.

The foundation provides forensic medical examination services as well as comprehensive counseling and support for women, men and children who make complaints of rape or sexual assault.

Her traumatic experience is a true reflection of the agony rape victims go through on a daily basis before they can access treatment and counseling.

According to women right activists, gender based violence in the country continues to receive little attention due to the low statistical evidence on the number of survivors.

The former Director of the Coalition on Violence Against Women (COVAW), Faith Kasiva , says figures available at the police department are by a large extent misleading and do not reflect the reality on the ground.

Kenya police crime report and data indicates that there were 876 rape cases, 1984 cases of defilement, 181 cases of sodomy, 191 cases of indecent assault and 173 cases of abduction in 2009.

“But this is just a drop in the ocean, a mere snapshot of the problem we have in Kenya,” adds Kasiva.

She says that majority of rape victims are suffering in silence due to lack of services to support the reporting and treatment of victims.

“Survivors fear that they will be victimized again should they make a report either through insensitive, accusatory questions on the part of service providers or lack sufficient protection following a report to prevent retaliation by the perpetrators,” she says.

The situation has been aggravated by the flawed justice system which in most cases has been unable to adduce sufficient evidence to sustain conviction.

“Poor levels of conviction of perpetrators due to lack of adequate investigations and prosecution by relevant authorities has stopped victims from pursuing justice,” she says.

She further notes that lack of knowledge amongst survivors on their legal rights and the available protection, stigma, shame and other cultural beliefs continues to discourage women from speaking about Gender Based Violence.

She says the perception that legal authorities were reluctant to take appropriate action had also stopped them from reporting the violations.

She says the existence of gender based recovery centres both at Nairobi Women’s Hospital and Kenyatta National had helped streamline the provisions of care to survivors of gender based violence by providing comprehensive medical, psychological and legal support to survivors in a one stop shop.

She also says the production of credible forensic evidence continues to defeat the prosecution of sexual offences. Currently the proper collection, storage and preservation of evidence is still dismal. “It is essential that the Government puts in place measures within the government chemist to ensure that DNA testing can be used in criminal cases including sexual violence crimes,” she says.

She says the trend must be replicated at the Provincial and District levels to ensure that comprehensive treatment and care is available to victims across the country.