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

Aside from the above and the Commission’s desire to dig deep into the horrifying
and life altering sexual violence that affected Kenyan women as well as some
men, the Commission itself was challenged stymied by a number of factors. By
definition, its work depended on the information that victims and institutions
were willing to share. However, for the reasons mentioned earlier, many women
and men did not want to speak about what had happened to them either in
public or private whether because of shame, fear, distrust of authorities
including us, their inability to identify perpetrators, or in contrast because of
possible retaliation by those who had attacked them, including people whom
they knew. Others who had never received medical treatment or counselling
worried about being traumatized again if they spoke of what had happened to
them. Even some individuals, who were courageous enough to come forth,
sometimes broke down in the course of testifying. Still others did not want to
give evidence because of cultural sensitivities that included discussing rape in
public. A case in point is Mombasa, where victims feared that they could be
shunned and ostracized by their communities for having lost their virginity
before marriage. The Commission also faced logistical problems in finding
victims especially those who had fled to other areas or had left for unknown
places after some IDP camps were closed when government began its “Operation
Rudi Nyumbani” resettlement program. Furthermore, given the limited time we
had to collect evidence about sexual violence from victims, the Commission did
not have enough time to verify whether some of what was heard was specifically
related to post-election violence or part of other crimes outside the Commission’s
mandate, an issue that was compounded because most victims did not report
about the sexual violations that they suffered and most did not receive medical
treatment, Reports would have been a means of verifying their evidence. A
further issue was that most women had little or no information about what to do
or where to go to report violations against them, something compounded by the
response of the police and indifference if not hostility to victims by communities
themselves.
267