Let’s talk about this!

A nine-year-old girl is raped and infected with the HIV virus. Am I reading a Stephen King novel? A four-year-old girl is defiled and strangled to death. Yes, it must be King’s more sinister editions.

A foreigner pays a mother to look the other way as he defiles her 13-year-old daughter. Wait! Stephen King meets a tabloid?

Where is the outrage? Anybody? No. Because of course, it must be fiction.

But it is not. These are everyday happenings in Kenya.

When did this madness start? Were we too preoccupied with politics to notice what was happening in our backyards? And now that we have noticed, it’s untidy, isn’t it? It’s ok, you can admit it, and I won’t judge you. You want to lock it away somewhere and not deal with it. Kind of like clutter you do not need around the house, but you can’t exactly throw out.

Sorry, here’s more… clutter.

In July, a businesswoman in Kisauni was gang-raped and then killed. Then they grabbed one of her daughters, dragged her to where her mother’s body was lying and gang-raped her as well. They left her in critical condition.

Wait, get out the popcorn, King is not done yet! Another 24-year-old was recently raped and died after her rapist inserted a broken bottle into her vagina. In another case in Nairobi, a naked decapitated female body was found dumped by the roadside.

Her ex-husband had cut out her tongue, breasts, eyes and genitals. This is one sick, disturbed puppy! Even Stephen King with all his fiction would have a hard time figuring out what you would be doing with all those body parts!

Have you heard about these cases? Probably not. You are more likely to hear about a political rally than you are to hear about a girl fighting for her life after being gang-raped, or getting mutilated.

Such are small items buried deep in the pages of your dailies. You know why? Because most of our newspapers are run by men! Conspiracy theory number: 3,450,879.

Think about it though, it’s like being in the house and fighting over the remote control. What the men want to watch and what the women want to watch is totally different. So why do we allow them to set our agendas every day? Why do we allow them to dictate the headline on our daily newspapers?

The Nation Media Group, the biggest media house in East and Central Africa (and the one picking up the tab for this column) only just hired the first ever female, Newspaper Managing Editor. She is in charge of the East African. Hang on, the first ever? What is wrong with this picture?

Imagine if a few more female Managing Editors were calling the shots, would things be different? Men cannot solve women’s problems. They cannot solve what they do not understand. They do not know what affects us or what is important to us.

I received a lot of feedback from people who had opinions about last week’s article about rape. I received a heartfelt letter from a rape victim. The reality is that this scourge is ignored a lot by the media, government and as a result, society as a whole.

This week my female editor wanted me to move on to something else. Her argument was that Saturday Magazine recently did a feature on rape (a celebrity brave enough to speak out about it; bless you, Adelle Onyango) and they also carried my column. So let’s move on.

No. I repeat:A nine-year-old girl is defiled and infected with the HIV virus. A four-year-old girl is defiled and strangled to death. A foreigner who pays the victim’s mother to look the other way defiles a 13-year old girl… So I ask again, where is the outrage? What do you want me to move on to? What is more important than this? The latest political coalition?

This is an election year. Let’s put on the pressure until one of our potential leaders takes this issue up because, no, it is not a Stephen King novel! It’s a real life horror right here in Kenya. Here is our clutter.

It is not going anywhere so we had better start dealing with this soon, because we do not have drawers large enough to hide it all.