The Gender Violence Recovery Centre’s (GVRC) recent figures show that Rongai, Hurlingham, Adams, and Kitengela are among the regions within Nairobi with the highest reported rates of gender-based violence (GBV).
A total of 2,519 survivors’ cases of GBV were reported, with women making up the majority of those cases, according to the figures, which cover the months of January through August. Rongai had 642 cases, followed by Hurlingham (472), Adams (443), Meru (263), Kitengela (291), Nakuru Hyrax (198), Mombasa (135), and Nakuru County with 79.
According to Alberta Wambua, the Executive Director of GVRC, two of the cases recorded in August were female political aspirants from Kisumu.
“The two women were raped while coming back from the campaign trail,” Ms Wambua said, who explained that the figures are not national.
According to her, there have been instances of women being raped as they were leaving political gatherings, and other women who were married suffered abuse because they identified with a different political party than their husbands. The centre doesn’t receive many incidents of violence, Ms Wambua continued, even though it is common among the political elite.
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“The wife of a politician prefers using a family doctor. They also don’t report to the police because even if they do, it will just take one call from the politician to end that story,” she said.
With 930 cases, defilement is the primary form of violence, followed by physical assault (702 cases), and rape (538 cases).
With 965 documented cases, people between the ages of 10 and 19 were the most affected, followed by those between the ages of 20 and 29, who had 666 instances reported. While 341 cases were reported for those 10 years of age and below, 375 cases were reported for those 30 to 39 years of age.
May saw the largest number of cases reported (385), followed by July with 350, April with 344, and January and March with 302 and 301, respectively.
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