Let's not normalise rape against women and girls

The first time grown men ever catcalled me I was a school-going child. I was walking to school. When such things happen, society blames it on the dress code of the victim. I was in my school uniform and it did not stop them.

Just like most women, at a young age, I knew I had to take the longest route home if I saw a group of men together. As a primary school kid, I knew not to speak back or look at my aggressors right in the eye. It is a defence mechanism all women learn before they get to puberty. Don't stop! Don't look at them! Increase your pace! Be gone from their sight as fast as you can.

The Kenyan culture is so steeped in rape culture that sexual violence is normalized. Everybody knows what happens to young girls, and women around the country yet, nobody does anything. Girls are harassed when they are walking to school in streets full of people and no one says anything. Daily, women are harassed in the CBD, in public transport, at work and in other public places and nothing happens. Sexual harassment and violence are the reality of life for women, and it is something they endure until they die.

Teenage pregnancies are a crisis in Kenya and it is a crisis that cannot be solved without uprooting the culture of sexual violence that is deep-rooted in our country. At least one in every five teenage girls, between the ages of 15-19 years, has either had a live birth or is pregnant with their first child. I have been a teenager and I have experienced the kind of attention given to girls by grown men who prey on their naïveté. Many of these girls are manipulated into these situations. Many cannot even look the men who lift their skirts in the eye and for that reason, it cannot be consent. It is rape and it is hardly ever seen as that. Schoolgoing girls are often blamed for seducing and tempting these older men, some of them who are their teachers because we are entrenched deep in a culture of rape and sexual violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Rape culture is pretending that all rapists hide in the shadows and denying the possibility that you could know someone who has been a perpetrator of sexual violence. Every woman I know has been catcalled in the streets since they were old enough to be sent to the shop alone. Every single woman I know has been groped in a club, grabbed when boarding a matatu, assaulted, survived a rape attempt, or been raped but no one knows the men who commit these crimes. We pretend they are unknown people even when we see them violating women in public spaces.

The rape culture is knowing grown men take advantage of young girls who suffer through period poverty and allow it to go on. Rape culture is where institutions ask girls to dress how they want to be addressed instead of telling boys that they will be held accountable for sexual assault.

Rape culture is not checking men who make school-going children uncomfortable. It is always finding a reason to justify why a sexual crime must have happened. "She is so provocative … What was she wearing? What was she doing in that street alone?" Rape culture is allowing the victims of violence to carry the blame for what happened to them instead of seeking justice for them. It is putting more focus on what the victim should or shouldn't have done instead of the fact that sexual violence should not be happening anywhere in the world. Rape culture is convincing women they can protect themselves by following a set of cliche rules that have not been known to work at any point in time.

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Rape culture is held together both systematically and socially. It is a group project with major key players. For rape culture to thrive as it has, it needs a social fabric that has been torn beyond repair and a community that is comfortable with unaccountability. For rape culture to thrive, it needs a society that blames women for the actions of violent men and a broken justice system that does do much for the victims. Rape is a kind of violence that should be declared a national emergency. Women and girls are not safe, and they should not continue to exist this way.