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.