When Mary Makokha walks into her office, the atmosphere shifts. Dressed in a bright Ankara dress, her hair buzzed short and dyed pink, she gleefully greets visitors.
Her outward demeanor is a far cry from the scourge she has to contend with in her line of work, femicide and gender-based violence.
As the founder of the Rural Education and Economic Enhancement Programme, Mary has a front row seat to the impact of deeply rooted patriarchy and silence, enabling violence against women.
“We started in 1997, dealing mainly with HIV cases,” she recalls. “But soon we realized widows, children, and girls were being left vulnerable to abuse, sodomy, murder, and femicide. The violence never ended, it just changed form.”
Many of the cases she takes on are bone-chilling. Mutilations and killings are consistent results.
She recounts stories of an eight-year-old disabled girl abducted, raped, and beheaded; widows killed by relatives eager to seize land; women murdered by estranged husbands as revenge; and other women raped and silenced permanently by perpetrators fearful of exposure.
“From childhood, girls are told to ‘vumilia‘ (Swahili for persevere) to tolerate abuse as part of marriage. That culture places women in an inferior position, where violence is normalized and femicide becomes the tragic outcome in many cases,” Makokha says.
Voices of gender-based violence in Busia, Kenya
At 85 years old, Lianna (not her real name) had never heard of the phrase “gender-based violence,” let alone thought she would be a victim.
“My husband had never abused me in any way – he was a very calm person. We lived in peace until he passed away. One Saturday night in December 2020, at around 11:00 pm, I heard some movements around my house. No sooner had I heard the movements than a man pushed the door open,” she said.
She says she was filled with shame and would not leave her bed the next day.
Lianna says that had a friend not found her stuck in bed ruminating over the violating ordeal, she probably would not have said a word about it. It pained her that the man who violated her was 32 years old, old enough to be her grandchild.
“The following day, I stayed in bed due to the embarrassment and the pain that I was going through. I could not wake up. My neighbor noticed that I had not come out of the house and came to check on me. I was then taken to the hospital and helped report the case.”