notes from fallow

152,000

In August 2020, Global Citizen published a news item on how Kenya’s lockdown had affected teenage girls. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Over a period of three months in lockdown due to COVID-19, 152,000 Kenyan teenage girls became pregnant — a 40% increase in the country’s monthly average. These numbers, from early July, are some of the earliest pieces of evidence linking the COVID-19 pandemic to unintended pregnancies.

Here’s how Voice of America reported the situation:

I am arrested by “became pregnant.” How did this happen? Were the girls picking flowers and then suddenly became pregnant? Were they winnowing beans when they suddenly became pregnant? Were they scrubbing floors and suddenly became pregnant? The question of who impregnated these girls is subordinated to the fact that they became pregnant.

In the VoA report, we get a slight hint: We are told that at least one of the girls in Machakos was “defiled.” In Kenyan law, adult women are raped while minors are defiled. Defiled is a terrible description: it ascribes impurity to victims and survivors. Still, this is how the law reads, and I want to stay within its confines. For now.

***

In late 2020, Mercy Chege, programme director at Plan International Kenya at the time, provided a few scenarios:

“Out of school, the girls had much free, unsupervised hours where the allure of sex for pads was irresistible. The government used to give sanitary pads to girls while in school but failed to extend the services to their homes when schools closed, leaving the girls at the mercy of ‘friends with benefits’.

“Sometimes sex was in exchange for as little as the 15 Kenyan shillings (10p) required to pay for a daily shower in a public bathroom. Many would go for days without taking a bath and could do anything to appease someone who promised them such small luxuries.”

She adds: “A few girls were lured into child pornography. Perpetrators told them it was not wrong since they did not have to practise what they saw, but they didn’t know they were being sexually abused.”

These scenarios are not implausible, but I am struck by how the danger is positioned outside of the home.

This strategy is not new. When the Sexual Offences Act was being discussed in parliament in 2004 and 2005, the outside perpetrator dominated the discussions, especially when women parliamentarians (only 18 in a house of over 200) urged their male colleagues to pass a law that would protect their mothers, wives, daughters, and other female relatives. By positioning the male parliamentarians—and, implicitly, all men and boys who live in a home—as protectors, the women parliamentarians avoided the spectre of men and boys in the home as predators.

The dangers of the domestic space were (partially) addressed in the Protection Against Domestic Violence Act (2015, revised 2022). This Act acknowledged a wide range of violent acts in the home:

In this Act, “violence” means—

(a) abuse that includes—

(i) child marriage;

(ii) female genital mutilation;

(iii) forced marriage;

(iv) forced wife inheritance;

(v) interference from in-laws;

(vi) sexual violence within marriage;

(vii) virginity testing; and

(viii) widow cleansing;

(ix) depriving the applicant of or hindering the applicant from access to or a reasonable share of the facilities associated with the applicant’s place of residence;

(b) damage to property;

(c) defilement;

(d) economic abuse;

(e) emotional or psychological abuse;

(f) forcible entry into the applicant’s residence where the parties do not share the same residence;

(g) harassment;

(h) incest;

(i) intimidation

(j) physical abuse;

(k) sexual abuse;

(l) stalking;

(m) verbal abuse; or

(n) any other conduct against a person, where such conduct harms or may cause imminent harm to the safety, health, or well-being of the person.

There are many things to admire about how this law is written. It is a textbook example of how to be comprehensive.

Regrettably, it is a textbook example that does not address the very real barriers faced by women and girls who attempt to address domestic violence. We have witnessed boys and men credibly accused of spectacular sexual violence sentenced to cut grass. We all have anecdotes of women who attempted to leave abusive husbands, only to be returned by their own families, and this experience cuts across class, and is, perhaps, even more common among affluent families.

There is a vast gap between how laws are written in Kenya and how victims and survivors experience legal processes: police stations (acab) routinely diminish girls’ and women’s reports, and there are credible accounts of police officers sexually assaulting those who report their assaults. The very few victims and survivors who manage to get into law courts are ostracised by family, friends, neighbours, and strangers. And if I am going on about legal processes, it is because I do not know how to write about the over 152,000 teenage girls impregnated during Kenya’s lockdown.

*

Pregnancy is evidence. Or, I should say: a kind of evidence.

If we dare, we must perform the necessary labour of speculating about the number of girls who were sexually assaulted without falling pregnant, and that number must include minors too young to menstruate. 152,000 might very plausibly mean that millions of girls were harmed within their domestic spaces.

Sure, it’s likely that girls were misled by strangers, but lockdown created intimate situations. Public places were shut down. Schools were shut down. Many places had restricted hours. Curfews were in place.

It is most likely that these girls encountered boys and men who lived in their neighbourhoods. It is most likely that many of these girls were sexually assaulted by boys and men in their homes. By fathers and uncles and grandfathers and brothers and cousins. By blood relatives and proximity relatives, those neighbours we call uncle and auntie.

From what I recall—correct me if I misremember—no national emergency was declared. No statements were made by political leaders. No calls to action were issued. I do not mean no action was taken. No doubt, organizations dedicated to sexual and reproductive health attempted to provide physical and mental care.

Six years after that 152,000 number was revealed, we are in the midst of a femicide in Kenya. Girls and women and all those framed as female—I owe this last formulation to Professor Pumla Gqola—are being harmed. Activists and organizers are asking the government to declare femicide a national emergency. While the spectre of the murdering stranger looms, available evidence confirms that many of these murders are being committed by intimate partners: husbands, lovers, boyfriends, and partners.

Our homes are not safe. Our neighbourhoods are not safe. Our public transport is not safe. Our ways of living as girl, as woman, as feminized, and as female are not safe.

The poet Shailja Patel writes, “Our bodies are our first homes. If we are not safe in our bodies, we are always homeless.”