Leaders flail as women rage in battle for their lives
Tens of thousands of Kenyans marched for women’s safety over the weekend. But some of the country’s leaders missed the point entirely
Lydia Namubiru
Kenya’s largest-ever protest against gender-based violence, thousands of women and their allies marched the streets of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret, Kilifi and other towns on Saturday. The protests followed a surge in cases of femicide – the killing of women – in the country. Media reported 14 cases of women murdered in January alone.
Estimates of the depth of Kenya’s femicide crisis vary widely but all indicate that hundreds of women are killed each year – 725 were murdered in 2022, according to a report by the United Nations’ office on drugs and crime.
At the Saturday protests, frustration with political failure on the issue was palpable. In the capital, Esther Passaris, the parliamentary representative of women in Nairobi County, was booed when she attempted to address the protesters.
Passaris is allied with President William Ruto and often embraces his “everything is an opportunity” governance style. Some of the protesters who booed her also engaged her on X to explain that they booed because they associate her with his regime and saw her presence at the protests as political expediency.
For the country’s 2022 survey on health and demographics, researchers asked women and men if they had experienced physical violence since turning 15. Of the women surveyed, 34% said they had (compared with 27% of men) and 16% said it had happened in the 12 months before the survey.
Also common are attitudes that justify violence against women. In the same survey, 43% of women and 35% of men said they believed that a husband was justified in beating his wife for at least one of eight listed reasons. These were: refusing sexual intercourse with him; infidelity; neglecting the children; coming home late; going out without his permission; arguing with him; and refusing to cook or burning the food.