Kenyan Conference Brings Legal, Activist, Governmental, Medical Practitioners Together to Improve Accountability for Sexual Violence Crimes

May 20, 2011

Survivor of rape, Zimbabwe, 2008. Read AIDS-Free World's    report on sexual violence in Zimbabwe here.

Kenyan government officials, Kenyan NGOs, and lawyers and activists from Liberia, Zambia, and the U.S., along with AIDS-Free World and the Berkeley Human Rights Center, will come together on May 25-27 to examine how to improve the Kenyan response to violent sexual crime, including in times of emergency.

“The Kenyan 2007 elections featured a horrific amount of systematic rape used as a political tool to punish people for their political choices. Sexual violence against women in daily life is also a major problem in Kenya, and we wanted to work with Kenyan groups to assess the Kenyan legal system’s capacity to protect women who might testify in prosecutions, if only they felt safe enough to do so,” noted Betsy Apple, AIDS-Free World’s Legal Director. One of the topics for discussion at the conference is victim and witness protection in the context of sexual violence, which presents particular challenges, as such programs must address the comprehensive needs of traumatized and possibly ill victims. Other issues include investigations, prosecutions, sexual violence and children, and medical and psycho-social support.

AIDS-Free World recognized the huge impediment that safety concerns presented to prosecutions of sexual crimes in its work documenting politically motivated rape in Zimbabwe around the 2008 elections in that country. “We interviewed more than eighty women from Zimbabwe who had been raped around the elections, and almost to a person, they described their terror about coming forward due to fear of reprisals from their perpetrators as well as concern about the stigma they would face from their communities,” said Shonali Shome, AIDS-Free World’s Legal and Gender Advisor. “This overwhelming fright convinced us that, without effective witness protection programs, legal accountability for sexual violence is impossible,” Shome added.

The Victim and Witness Protection panel will present Alice Ondieki, head of Kenya’s Witness Protection program; Felicia Coleman, Chief Prosecutor in the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Unit in Liberia’s Ministry of Justice; Deweh Grey, Commissioner at the Law Reform Commission of Liberia; Judy Gitau, Programme Officer of the International Commission of Jurists; and AIDS-Free World’s Betsy Apple.

The Kenyan conference will be the first time a diverse range of actors — government officials, lawyers, activists, doctors, Kenyan service providers, and those working on sexual violence in other countries — come together in one place to assess Kenyan accountability efforts for sexual crimes.  “We think this is a really exciting moment — especially in the wake of the new Constitution in Kenya and all the accompanying reforms — to refocus on how, together, we can work for justice for some of Kenya’s most invisible and vulnerable survivors,” said Apple.

Read more about the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop

Read the press release on the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop

Read more about AIDS-Free World's panel on victim and witness protection

Read AIDS-Free World's report on victim and witness protection

View the program for the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)