Shelter protects and defends raped girls

 

When her mother forced her to take water to the bathroom for her stepfather two days after he defiled her, Valence Awuor*, 13, knew it was time to run away from home.

Awuor (name changed) remembers the fateful Thursday morning when she was forced to endure seeing her tormentor after he defiled her two days earlier on a Tuesday.

“He told me to refute everything I had told my mother a day before, otherwise I was going to have problems with him,” Awuor says.

Experts say the biggest hindrance to justice for sexual abuse victims, especially minors, is lack of witness protection.

Awuor says her stepfather was pretending to be watching television in the sitting room after supper when he forced himself on her while everybody was asleep.

“On Wednesday morning, I wrote a letter to my mother, explaining what happened, and I refused to come back for lunch. In the evening she asked if what I wrote was the truth and I said yes. She might have asked him because he threatened me on Thursday morning,” she narrates with a faraway look.

On Thursday, when she didn’t go for lunch at home for a second time, her teacher and a classmate helped her report the incident at Kamagambo police station in Migori county, where the suspect was arrested.

It emerged that the stepdad was also defiling Awuor’s elder sister, a Form 2 student at a local secondary school.

The case is ongoing in court, and the man is still in police custody. “I hope he gets jailed for life for what he did to me,” Awuor says.

The Class 6 pupil wants to be a nurse in future, but currently with the schools closed, she is staying at the I Can Fly rescue centre at Nyamasare village, tucked in a valley among acres and acres of sugarcane plantation.

When the Star visited, she was among 22 girls who remained behind at the centre. It has a capacity of 76 girls but before schools closed, it had 40 girls, who are gradually being integrated back to the society.

“The youngest among them is a 12-year-old who was impregnated by her biological father. She is undergoing trauma, depression and had to be given transfusion to help her and the unborn child as she threatened to terminate the pregnancy,” Grace Adhiambo, a social worker at the centre, said.  BY THE STAR