Gender violence epidemic: Kenyan women train to fight back

From the young woman brutally murdered and dismembered in a short-term rental apartment to the Olympic runner set on fire by her estranged boyfriend, a surge in violence against women in Kenya has spurred many to prepare themselves to fight back.

At least 97 women across Kenya were killed in femicides - intentional killings with a gender-related motivation - between August and October of last year, according to police figures.

The police did not provide statistics for earlier periods, but according to figures compiled by the Africa Data Hub collective based on media reports, there were at least 75 femicides in 2023 and 46 the year before.

Activists said the recent upward trend is felt across Kenya's impoverished informal settlements, where women's efforts to protect themselves have taken on fresh urgency.

Inside a church in the Korogocho area of the capital Nairobi, Mary Wainaina, 93, thumped a punching bag. "No! No! No!" she shouted, before running away from a classmate pretending to be a male aggressor.

For the dozen members of the class, who refer to themselves as Cucu Jukinge, Swahili for "Grandma protect yourself", the lessons have never been purely theoretical.

The course was started nearly 25 years ago by an American couple working with local residents after several women were raped and killed in Korogocho, an impoverished and crime-plagued sprawl of iron shacks along the Nairobi River.

Shining Hope for Communities, a non-profit, said it had supported 307 survivors of gender-based violence in Korogocho between October and December alone.

A few years ago, Wainaina said she used her self-defence skills to fend off a man who tried to rape her.

Esther Njeri Muiruri, 82, said she found the current surge in violence against women just as worrying as the wave of attacks that prompted the class's creation.

"It's something that scares us, to see young mothers and young women being killed," she said, as a classmate nearby practised striking a would-be attacker with a cane.

Gender-based violence has long been a major problem in Kenya because of patriarchal views, socioeconomic inequalities and insufficient legal protections, researchers say. For example, Kenyan law does not criminalise spousal rape, meaning it can only be punished under laws covering non-sexual assaults.

Alberta Wambua, director of the Gender Violence Recovery Centre, said economic hardship fuelled such violence as men frustrated by their financial struggles lashed out at women.

Kenyan police routinely fail to respond to complaints of gender-based violence, often considering them private matters, Betty Kabari, an activist with End Femicide Kenya, told Reuters.

"We have a lot of cases of domestic violence where it's not that the perpetrator is not known," she said. "They are known, but the police have no interest in following up."

The professional runner Rebecca Cheptegei, whose ex-boyfriend killed her in September by dousing her in petrol and setting her alight, had gone to the police at least three times last year to report threats and physical abuse by him, her family said.

In an interview, a police spokesperson said the police were taking the issue of femicide seriously and that the Directorate of Criminal Investigations had recently established a Missing Persons Unit to concentrate on the murders of women.

But activists say they see few signs of progress. When several hundred people marched last month in Nairobi against femicide, the police fired teargas and arrested several of them.

The police spokesperson later acknowledged "mismanagement" in the handling of the demonstration. The following week, the government created a presidential working group that it gave 90 days to deliver recommendations for addressing femicide.

For now, the Cucu Jukinge said they could only count on themselves. Beatrice Mungai, 81, recalled the time a young man tried to break into her house.

"I quickly started kicking him in his private parts three times. He started screaming asking me not to kill him," she said. "I told him: I warned you."