We protested for our clothes, now let's do that for our bodies and save hurting souls

Even though I love what is on trend, and I can describe almost all types of clothing and accessories, I am never bothered by how a woman dresses because to me, fashion is an art, and people express their art in different ways.

That is why I still do not understand why some people recently stripped a woman naked because they did not like her sense of dress. It is despicable to write the least, and criminal too to humiliate people in public because of their dressing.

What happened in downtown Nairobi was trivialised by the subsequent euphoric media coverage as journalists used their hearts, and very little, if not nothing, of their heads, to tell the story.

For a fleeting moment, we forgot all the proposals that Kenyan laws are, and lost our sense of geography, history and logic, and went about shouting and screaming as if the victims were going to hear us from where they were recuperating and get justice.

In the process, we did not even mention the name of the street where this dastardly act happened, but instead stuck to the name of a passenger service vehicle cooperative society as if the crime was committed on their bus.
Of course we should look out for one another and prevent crimes from being committed, but we acted as if the cooperative society not only own the whole street, but get paid from public coffers to provide security.

I do not hold brief for that society, but as a journalist, and a citizen, I was appalled at our euphoric reportage and carelessness. I would not be surprised if the society sues for defamation, more so if you consider that most of their workers are women.

That narrative fits well with Kenya’s new age feminism: At the end of the day, it is not about how many girls and women’s lives I have touched or changed, but the number of boys and men I have insulted, bashed and blamed.

We were so engrossed in our own hype that we refused to respond to another serious emergency of young women  losing the most sensitive parts of their bodies in the name of culture.
This is the Female Genital Mutilation season, and while we were demanding what is left of our clothes in Nairobi, the world was wondering why our “customs run deeper than our laws”.

As Nairobi women took to the streets, a bevy of girls were undergoing what any right thinking adult can vouchsafe is the most painful experience of their lives.

If they live through this outlawed custom performed under unhygienic conditions, they will be miserable for the rest of their lives if they are to have children.

All is not lost and the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence starts on Tuesday, November 25, which is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and ends on December 10.

Blood and tears

Through out the week, I have scoured our newspapers and weekly “women’s magazines” and I am yet to encounter the three letters - FGM. That shows just how most of the time we are out of touch with reality.

Save for the advertisement by Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru in the Thursday newspapers, only last week’s edition of this paper’s Sunday Magazine published the gory pictures of what is happening in Baringo County.

Seemingly, we cannot let the blood and tears of those young women stain our clothes.

Ye all pseudo-intellectuals, spare me the nonsensical excuse that FGM is culture and it will take time before it is eradicated. Culture is a construct which is being used as an excuse by the strippers too. If anything, stripping will soon become culture.

It is understandable that the city’s lights blind us to the goings on in the villages, but when we want to wage war against atrocities committed on women, it should be an all-out war on all fronts so that we get an all-round just society. It is not easy to understand Kenyans’ collective mind, but people, our online shenanigans are eventually catching up with us offline.

For several months, we have been stripping naked the so-called socialites online, and cheering with our fingers when two middle-aged men go on national TV, in a live broadcast, to tell us about fashion and strip naked young women for their choice of clothes during a sporting event.

“If you cannot wear it near your mother, do not wear it anywhere else,” they pontificate.

It was not easy to let facts get in the way of a horrid tale that put the country on the international spotlight — yeah, when you are a desperate nation, all the bad publicity is the best — and saw all law enforcement agencies and their attendant bosses making words with their mouths and trawling new media platforms with their sticky fingers and cold hearts, not with their heads.

Hit songs

These are the people we ought to ask questions. Wasn’t security enhanced in the city, especially at such busy and crowded places? How come law enforcement officers did not see or hear the victim’s screams, and rescue her or apprehend the attackers? Have they been identified, and when are they appearing in court?

These are the questions we are not asking because everything got covered by the little fabric that remained of our dresses which we protested for.

Truth be told, the protestations were all about our clothing, and from our actions, we could as well have held a demonstration because our clothes were taken from our wardrobes, clothes lines, washing machines, driers or dry cleaners and not yanked off our bodies which were violated in the process.

We acted as if our clothes, not our bodies, were violated in a serious offence that should be addressed under the Sexual Offences Act.

To be fair, our brothers and sisters on the streets were not mentioning it either because it could have wasted their precious time which was to be used to tour the city centre. In truth, they were local tourists who wanted to see and experience for the first time the backstreets, by-lanes, blocked storm drains and such other stuff that are not available in gated communities.

They had limited time and wanted to see at close range the contraptions that are matatus, jump on them and take selfies...oh, memories are made of such!
We were all for the prosecution of the offenders, but what were they to be charged with? Plain, simple and the lesser charge of assault then let off the hook for lack of evidence because the right procedures were not followed in the quest for justice.

As I have written many times before, gender violence, or specifically cases of sexual violence against women, will not be eradicated if we do not push for the proper enforcement of the Sexual Offences Act.

Have we even bothered to push for the establishment of gender desks at police stations as stipulated in the Act? No. We have not, and now we have the lamest excuse ever: lack of police reforms. As long as we keep treating sexual offences and cases of violence against women not as causes but as hit songs or fads, we will keep screaming while dancing ourselves lame on the streets and calling each other names on new media platforms about our dresses, our nudity and whether they are our choices or not.

We have to bring to an end all gender-based violence and all atrocities against women and children. That will only happen when we take them up as causes, and not as social events like we did earlier in the week.

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