Publication Date
September 10, 2012
NDHIWA, KENYA –Akinyi Brenda, 23, is a statistic in Kenya. Her ragged clothes give away her social status. She is an AIDS orphan. She is was raped. She is a single mother. She is HIV positive.
Life has been difficult for her since her mother died in 2002 when she was just 15, leaving her an orphan. And just one year after her mother died, Brenda took a job as a maid in Kisumu, a port city in Western Kenya. One Sunday, her boss, the lady of the house, informed her that she and the children were going the market. Brenda says she was told that her employer’s husband was upstairs sleeping and was given instructions “not to wake him.”
“They went to the market leaving me [at home] with the husband,” Brenda says. “At around one p.m. [he] came out calling ‘Akinyi, where are you?’ I shouted, ‘I am here sir,’” she recalls. He told her he was hungry and instructed her to make some food.
Brenda prepared the food and brought it to him in the bedroom. “I placed the food on the table and the next minute [he] was all over me,” Brenda says.
He raped her and threatened to fire her if she told anyone what happened.
So Brenda kept silent. About a month later, she fell ill and her employ allowed her to take leave. But her condition soon worsened. First, a small rash appeared on her neck. When she scratched it, a watery substance dripped from her skin. As the rash continued to spread to the rest of her body, Brenda decided to seek the help of an herbalist.
But the herbs he prescribed only made it worse. ”The villagers claimed I had been bewitched since after using the herbal medicine the rash spread to the rest of my body,” she says.
With nowhere else to go, Brenda returned back to Kisumu to the home of her employer. When she arrived, no one was home. Brenda sat on the front step until she returned. “I was afraid because I did not know how she would react [because] I had stayed away without communicating with her,” Brenda says.
“At 3 p.m. my employer came home. She saw me and said to me, ‘Akinyi what happened?’ I told her that I had been sick. She told me to spend the night and that the next day she [would] take me to the hospital,” Brenda recalls.
The next day Brenda and her employer went to Ndhiwa sub District Hospital. Doctors at the hospital were unable to diagnose her skin condition and advised her to go to Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, the capital.
She reached Nairobi the next day and managed to find the hospital. She was diagnosed with seborrhoeic dermatitis, an inflammatory skin disorder. But that was not the end of her diagnosis. Doctors informed her that she was both pregnant and HIV positive.
In Kenya, more than 1.4 million young people have been orphaned by the AIDS virus and forced to take work as children or young adults. To compound matters, the number of rapes occurring in Kenya each year has been on the rise since 2003. But for HIV positive people who were raped, the stigma of the disease continues while those guilty of rape are rarely prosecuted. And access to antiretroviral medication, ARVs, which keep the virus at bay is difficult to come by in rural areas, despite government efforts to make the drug free and widely available.
When Brenda arrived at Kenyatta National Hospital, she received ARVs to control her HIV infection and other drugs for her skin condition. But once she was discharged from the hospital, she had nowhere to go. So she took the bus back to her employer’s house. But when she divulged that she was both HIV positive and pregnant with her employer’s husband’s baby, she was turned away.
“I had no options. I told my employer that the baby was as a result of rape from her husband. She chased me out of the house,” Brenda says.
With no place to go Brenda decide to leave and return to her hometown of Ndhiwa. But when news of her HIV positive status and of the rape were revealed, family and friends in Ndhiwa shunned her, as stigmatization here is still common despite the fact that AIDS has been a way of life for more than 20 years.
As a young woman living with AIDS, she faced increased stigma then and she says it continues today. UNICEF Kenya Communication Officer Sara Cameron says it is common for women to be victimized by both family and the larger community when her HIV status is revealed. “And it’s not only that they’ve been victimized by others outside their families,” she says. “They are sometimes victimized by their own families. It’s something that happens here, but also in so many other places.”
The National AIDS Control Council, NACC, estimates that 1.4 million Kenyans are infected with HIV/AIDS while as much as 80 percent of the population does not know their HIV status. Continued stigma negatively affects people’s willingness to get tested.
When Brenda gave birth to a baby girl at Kenyatta National Hospital six years ago, she was told that she would have to visit Nairobi frequently to obtain her ARVs as well as social support for her daughter. She returned to her home village, but says she is still forced to make frequent trips to Nairobi – a 7-hour bus ride – in order to get her ARVs and pick up money for her daughter at the local welfare office.
Brenda says she has struggled to find work over the last six years too. She says she takes any small job that is offered to her, but no one will provide her with fulltime work thanks to her HIV status and her skin disorder, which prevents her from working outdoors.
”Even getting casual jobs in the area is not easy because of the stigma. I cannot work especially [when] the sun gets hot as it triggers off the scratching,” she says.
Without a job and access to ARVs, Brenda makes the trek to Nairobi several times a month, which she says is disappointing because the government here enacted the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Act in 2006 and National AIDS Strategic Plan have guaranteed access to ARVs. The plan aims to achieve comprehensive integration of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and socio-economical protection in the public and private sector.
Mary Njieri Gichuru, executive director of the Coalition to Prevent Violence Against Women, COVAW, says the social protection policy of the AIDS plan aims to protect those infected and affected by giving them support through meaningful and sustained economic growth. But Brenda has yet to see any support on that level.
Gichuru says Brenda’s case is of great interest, not only because of her HIV status and the difficulty she faces in trying to procure her medication, but also because she was infected as a result of rape. Gichuru says the Sexual Offences Act of 2006 was supposed to address the issue of rape and sexual violence, but four years later, rape cases are on the rise in Kenya.
Earlier this year, public outcry resulted when new data suggested that rape and sexual violence against children was on the rise. According to data from the Kenya Police Department, there are 2,012 rapes, 1,759 defilements, and 177 cases of sodomy reported annually across the country. Gichuru says those numbers are high, but says rape remains a crime that is rarely reported here.
“When you read newspapers or watch on television you will see that men are rarely sentenced for rape,” Gichuru says. “Victims rarely appeal such cases because the judge may acquit. You can’t tell what the judge will do.”
In Kenya, rape cases are supposed to be heard in closed court to protect the identity of the person who was raped, but Gichuru says most cases are held in open court.
Gichuru says that local police are often reluctant to fill in the case forms too. She says there have been several recent cases where officers have testified that they have even lost their evidence books in rape cases.
A report by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority in 2004 found that judges in appellate and high courts took bribes from both parties in a case and ruled in favor of the most generous. According to the report, several judges demanded sex from litigants, lawyers and defendants in return for a favorable verdict. In 2004, just after Brenda was raped, the report revealed that it took just $250 USD to beat a rape charge; and $500 USD for murder acquittal.
The Anti-Corruption Authority reported that Kenyan police reputedly are the most rampant bribe-takers. “The police force, even more corrupt than the judiciary, needs an even more thorough purge,” the London-based newsletter Africa Confidential published in 2004. No more recent statistics are available.
“Police are born, bred and socialized with the rest of us. If you did not respect women yesterday you re not going to respect them today because you are a police officer,” Gichuru says.
Local police officers did not comment for this article.
Nairobi lawyer Cliff Ombeta says police are dependent on evidence collected from crime scenes. But in cases like Brenda’s the rapes are not reported in a timely fashion, or at all due to threats.
Gichuru called on the Kenyan community to be vigilant on rape cases and “not to give excuse to people who perform the act.”
Brenda says her life changed forever when she was raped. Now an HIV positive single mother, she struggles to feed herself and her daughter. She continues to make the long journeys to Nairobi to get the medication she needs to keep her HIV under control.
