PART III Extent and Impact of Post Election Violence - Mars Group ...

property destroyed, losing their family members, and suffering from other types
of violence. Twelve of the thirty came from Nairobi, two from Naivasha, six from
Nakuru, four from Eldoret, six from Kisumu, one from Mombasa, but none from
Kisii, even though sexual violence occurred there too. While the Commission
feels that much of what it heard was broadly indicative of what happened, its
assessment comes from a small group of people who do not constitute a
statistically representative sample. For reasons noted earlier, victims of sexual
violence are often reluctant to testify.
The Commission was able to find thirty women who agreed to testify. However,
while men and male children were also targets of sexual violence, none were
willing to be interviewed by the Commission’s investigators or to testify before
the Commission. This was the situation in Naivasha where there were many
forced male circumcisions, including on a teenaged boy who was near where the
Commission’s investigators were taking statements, but was too traumatized to
record his story.
Of those testifying to the Commission or whose statements were recorded, the
majority were not well off, if not poor. Before the post election violence many
were engaged in small business activities. These included selling cereals,
vegetables, and second-hand clothes, working in beauty shops and bars,
engaging in subsistence farming, and working as casual labourers on farms or
as house maids. In Nairobi, all those interviewed lived in the slums of Mathare
and Kibera, while the victims in Nakuru, Naivasha, Eldoret, Kisumu, and
Mombasa lived on the outskirts of the towns or in the rural areas. Eighteen of
the women interviewed were attacked in their homes, seven while fleeing from
violence, three while looking for food or children lost as a result of the prevailing
mayhem in their neighbourhoods, one while being dragged out of her house by
someone she knew, with the remaining suffering other experiences. Twenty four
of the thirty victims who gave statements to the Commission or to its
investigators were gang raped. Seventeen rapes were committed by civilians
involving 2 to 12 individuals while 7 were committed by state security agents
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