Women’s rights activists are urging President William Ruto to declare femicide a national disaster and hasten the determination of all court cases about women’s deaths and attacks on women.
The Coalition of Grassroots Human Rights defenders says dealing with the increasing killing of women, particularly the killing by intimate partners, should trigger a robust response from all government apparatus to combat it.
“We are calling on the President to declare femicide a national disaster and also calling for a judicial review of all matters relating to femicide to ensure justice,” the group said in a statement issued on Sunday.
“We ask all state and non-state actors to desist from normalising femicide and start linking it to the right to life, the right of dignity, freedom from torture, freedom from degrading treatment and the right to assembly,” the coalition said.
Femicide has been a major issue in Kenya, with latest police report showing that as many as 97 women have been killed over 90 days.
Deputy Inspector General of Police Eliud Lang’at, who released the report, said the trend required urgent intervention before it’s virtually impossible to handle.
“This troubling trend highlights the urgent need for focused actions and collaborations to tackle the widespread problem of gender-based violence in our society,” he said.
DCI boss Mohammed Amin, however, challenged the gender-targeting narrative, saying that investigation of all attacks and killings of women generally show criminal intent, not gender bias.
“We are not saying there is a deliberate effort to target women. In the majority of cases we have investigated, the motive is criminal. There was no intention to specifically target members of the female gender,” Amin said.
Last month’s killing of a woman, her daughter and niece in Eastleigh, Nairobi, is part of this data. So high are the rates of violence against women and their killing that reports indicate that in January this year alone, more than 10 women were victims.
The lobby’s boss, Rachel Mwikali, said that with killing often targeting young women in universities and colleges, “the management of higher learning institutions needs to take deliberate steps to start addressing gender-based violence and femicide and take stern actions against perpetrators”.
She said the institutions should “develop early warning systems to detect such potential cases in advance for prevention”.
“Duty bearers must start interrogating whether the existing laws and even the penal code can adequately address the femicide crisis in the country,” Mwikali said.
“It is baffling why such cases are on the rise despite the existence of laws that claim to protect the lives of women and girls in the country.”
The lobby also complained that security agencies in a patriarchal society are not treating femicide cases with seriousness and their attitudes and work need to change.
“We raise concerns that security apparatus are not taking this matter with the seriousness it deserves,” Mwikali said in a statement.
The rate of the killings has attracted the attention of
top leaders, with President William Ruto and Chief Justice Martha Koome calling for tougher, swifter action
by security arms.