When police were the rapists

There was massive conspiracy by police to sweep under the carpet sex crimes committed during the violence.

And in some cases, the GSU and police themselves were the rapists, the commission concludes.

Women victims of violence were happy to see police as they fled from their tormentors only for the officers to turn on them and rape them.

The commission says most senior policemen who appeared before it presented statistics on crimes committed during the mayhem, which did not include sexual crimes.

When asked why this was so, most of them, including police commissioner Maj-Gen Hussein Ali, said there were no cases of rapes reported.

But evidence on the ground suggests the contrary. The report accuses police of deliberately refusing to record statements from women who had been raped.

As a result, the report says, sexual crimes were “under-reported, under-investigated and insufficiently addressed.”

“Given the number of allegations made by witnesses as well as victims of sexual violence against the police, the commission was deeply troubled by the apparent lack of interest by the police in preventing and investigating sexual violence in general and in not policing its own, something that should be rectified,” the report says.

Most of the victims, it says, were poor women raped in their own houses in front of their spouses and children in the slums of Kibera, Mathare and elsewhere by gangs of up to 20 youths, GSU, police and even their own husbands.

The later happened mostly in marriages where women came from communities seen to support political parties the husbands did not support.

Others were raped in IDP camps by service providers and criminal gangs. Some of the sexual crimes committed by police were motivated by ethnic hatred.

The report says 68 per cent of the women raped were either married, divorced or widowed. They were all aged between 17 and 68.

Harrowing tales of men abandoning their wives after the rapes and the trauma of being raped in front of their children and husbands are told.

The report calls for the implementation of the Sexual Offences Act, developing new police guidelines, compensation of victims of the crimes and psychological support.

Dr Sam Nthenya of Nairobi Women’s Hospital told the commission that the institution treated up to 900 victims of sexual crime in Nairobi alone, and this was just a tip of the iceberg.

A few were men who had been sexually assaulted but an overwhelming majority were women.

In Trans Nzoia West, 119 cases of sexual crime were reported. Because they did not immediately report or seek medical attention, many women contracted HIV and other venereal diseases or got pregnant.

The report is scathing about the police response to sexual crimes. Sexual violence, it says, appeared not to be given high priority by police; arguably this is also the case during more peaceful times.

The Rift Valley provincial commissioner is quoted as telling the commission: “We have not received any cases of sexual assault throughout the one and half months of violence in Rift Valley.”

However, the report says, it would have been known to anyone living in Kenya at the time that there were many allegations of sexual violence throughout the country.

“So to merely omit this category of offences, or to claim there were no formal reports seems akin to burying ones head in the sand, and does not speak of a strong will to uphold the law as it relates to sexual offending,” the report says, adding that police figures in respect of sexual violence were lower than hospital figures.

In some places the commission went, police reported having received no such cases, and yet hospitals and NGOs were busy attending to victims of sexual assaults and rapes.

The report says police response to sexual violence “was generally well below what can reasonably be expected”. The commission gives examples of victims whose attempts to report were dismissed by police.

Several weeks

A Mathare rape victim who reported to police several weeks later did not have her complaint accepted, with the officer telling her he could not know if her allegation was true, given she had not attended a hospital.

Other responses could be characterised as cruel and indicative of a callous disregard for human safety.

A Mathare victim of gang rape who went to police bleeding and seeking help for her injured husband was waved away by police who simply told her to run for her life.

Many victims who reported, or attempted to report to police, the report says, were arbitrarily discouraged or dismissed if the victim could not immediately identify by name the perpetrator.

Victims who went to police to make statements were turned away without so much as an Occurrence Book number. The commission says a victim’s ability to name the offender should never be a prerequisite to the reporting and recording of a crime.

It calls into question many aspects of the police operation, including training, the quality and capacity of criminal investigation, commitment to addressing sexual violence and the value that is placed on criminal intelligence.

The report notes that many of these responses were given in the midst of the worst of the chaos and occurred at a time when police were struggling to control an anarchic situation with multiple threats to life and property.

But, the commission says, no significant attempts were made by police in the intervening, more peaceful period to follow up the serious offences.

Women who were raped by police did not bother to report the crime. But one did attempt to make a report to Kilimani Police of being raped by an officer: “I told them that my house had been burned down and a policeman had raped me.

“They asked me whether I knew the police who had raped me. I told them I did not.

I was to blame

“They told me to choose between the two — my house being burnt or being raped. “I wrote a statement that my house had been burnt but left out the rape... They told me I was to blame for the rape.”

The report says if police do not act decisively in the face of allegations against their own, then any credibility they may have in this area of sexual violence is greatly undermined.

There was a report of women victims being taken into a police station and cared for by the female police officers. Despite this compassionate response, no statement was taken from the victims or investigation commenced.

The report appreciates that up to 100 rape victims treated at Nairobi Women’s Hospital were taken there by police.

But it was only shortly before the hospital’s CEO Dr Thenya testified before the commission on July 15, 2008, that police visited the hospital seeking medical records.

The commission says reporting of sexual violence is only one step in the process. There needs to be a strong investigative response and there was little evidence of this approach being taken during the post-election violence.