International Human Rights Program and Law and Feminism Series take a closer look at "160 Girls" project
By Alice Tsier, 1L
“In Kenya, every 30 minutes a girl is raped.” This is the chilling statistic that Fiona Sampson, the executive director of Equality Effect, uses to explain the urgency of her organization’s work.
“That means that while we speak here today, three women will be raped.” Sampson was the first speaker at a panel discussion on Jan. 24, 2011 at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, co-sponsored by the Law and Feminism Series and the International Human Rights Program.
The panelists focused on the “160 Girls Project,” an Equality Effect initiative that seeks to bring justice to rape victims in Kenya. The panel also included Christine Kung’u, a human rights lawyer from Kenya and an LLM candidate at the University of Toronto, as well as Mary Eberts, a human rights lawyer, PhD candidate in law at U of T, and the current Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan.
The “160 Girls Project” seeks justice for 160 Kenyan girls by forcing the state to enforce its own existing laws against sexual violence. The project is still in its earliest stages and there are several available paths. One option, says Sampson, may be to launch a civil case in negligence against the police. Another may be to go the criminal route. A third route may be to launch a health claim rooted in section 43 of the Kenyan constitution. One unique aspect of this project is that it will draw on the Canadian experience in advancing women’s rights as a starting point for the equality analysis. The reason for this is that the work is so urgent that there is no time to start the analysis from scratch and, in Sampson’s words, “reinvent the equality wheel.”
No need to “reinvent the equality wheel.”
--Fiona Sampson
Police violations of rape-victims’ rights are an ongoing barrier to justice in Kenya. Christine Kung’u described the harrowing experiences that girls and their families face when they choose to report a rape to police. First, girls and women face the possibility of violence at the hands of the police. Frequently, victims are raped a second time by the police officers to whom they complain.
Second, there are numerous financial barriers to achieving justice. Police officers will refuse to drive out to rural communities to investigate rape, citing a lack of gas for their cars and forcing victims to pay if they want investigation. Other police stations force victims to pay $20 for the forms they need in order to file a complaint.
A third barrier is the inefficiency of the judicial system – cases drag on for so long that victims and their families give up, wanting to move on with their lives. Finally, the stigma associated with rape prevents individuals from going to the police for fear of the information spreading in their community.
The Canadian experience has some starting points to offer for attempting to combat police behaviour through the courts. The legal team can draw on cases such as Jane Doe v. Metropolitan Toronto Commissioner of Police – a case where the Toronto Metropolitan police force was held liable for failing to warn Doe that she was in danger.
Canadian experience has "some starting points, but also a lot of undone
work and mess-ups along the way."
--Mary Eberts
However, the Canadian experience includes a lot of “undone work and mess-ups along the way,” according to Mary Eberts, the last speaker on the panel. Eberts talked about achieving empowerment through law for women, which means more than just filing a complaint and getting people into a courtroom. Often, after the initial steps are taken, women find that the processes of the justice system work against them, allowing their attackers to escape punishment.
Eberts spoke as well about formal and informal structures of impunity that prevented women from achieving empowerment through the law and the need to be sensitive to the ways in which discretion (such as a prosecutor’s discretion as to whether or not to bring charges) can turn into a mechanism of oppression. Eberts’ speech was a reminder that although Canada’s experience had much to offer for a project such as "160 Girls," there still remains a lot of work to be done for women’s equality here at home.
The panel concluded with several women in the audience sharing their own experiences working with similar issues. One woman described the challenges of working with young male rape victims in Colombia, whose families often choose not to seek justice in order to avoid the stigma associated with rape. Another woman inquired about the specifics of the "160 Girls Project’s" legal strategy, prompting a discussion from Eberts about the need for strong social movements to rally around judicial decisions in order to achieve real change.
What was striking about this part of the panel discussion was the way in which all the panelists engaged with the audience, answering their questions and taking note of their suggestions. There was a real sense in the room of the kind of energy and momentum that is behind the "160 Girls Project," an energy that is very much needed to tackle the magnitude of problems that Equality Effect is taking on.
