Activists on mission to end gender-based violence
NAIROBI, KENYA>> Njeri Migwi’s phone buzzes incessantly. Phone calls and messages keep coming in from women seeking help to escape life-threatening situations. A mother and her remaining child are looking for a place to stay after her partner allegedly raped and killed her two other children, including a 6-month old.
Moments later, someone calls looking to help a woman who has been nearly beaten to death.
“Sometimes I feel like I am the government, because I’m doing the work that they should be doing,” says Migwi, 43, the cofounder of a communitybased organization called Usikimye, which means “Don’t be silent” in Swahili. The organization helps women escape violent relationships, puts them up in safe houses and counsels them on how to rebuild their lives.
Migwi is on the front lines of a war against a silent epidemic of genderbased violence in Kenya, where almost 60 women have been killed since the beginning of the year, according to the government.
She says her work supporting and protecting survivors of gender-based violence feels like a drop in the ocean compared to the floodgate of victims seeking help daily. Only in January of this year, Migwi says, 32 women were victims of femicide, defined by the United Nations as “the intentional killing with a gender-related motivation.”
“What would the government do if 32 women were killed by a disease in a month? It would declare it a national disaster,” Migwi said.
Kenya’s Demographic and Health Survey of 2023 found that more than 11 million women — or 20% of the population — have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner during their lives, with 2.8 million of those women having experienced this type of violence in the last 12 months.
Odipo Dev, a Kenyan research firm, says at least 500 women in Kenya were killed because of their gender from January 2016 to December 2023.
Migwi, a survivor of domestic violence herself, says
Camera he sees the statewide occupancy bill as an extension of the work he and others have been doing.
“Boulder has made progress in relaxing its laws, but fundamentally, they’re still flawed, because Boulder enforces discriminatory housing laws against people that have no rational basis in health or safety … This passage of this law (will be) so important for Boulder because cities will be forced to regulate only in a way that doesn’t discriminate (based) on the people living inside it,” Budd said.
Budd testified in support of the bill at the state Capitol on Jan. 30 before the House Committee on Transportation, Housing and Local Government. That committee advanced the bill to the house floor, and on Feb. 9, the bill passed the House on third reading on a 4020 vote, mostly along party lines. Two Democrats, Rep. Shannon Bird of Westminster and House Majority Leader Monica Duran of Wheat Ridge, voted against the measure alongside 18 Republican members.
State Rep. Junie Joseph, D-boulder, was among those who voted “yes” on the bill. Reached for comment, she said she sees occupancy as “one of the tools” Boulder has for increasing the supply of housing.
“Especially in a place like Boulder, when we cannot
A woman walks past a mural opposing gender-based violence on a street in Nairobi, Kenya, on Wednesday. Globally, one in three women experiences violence from intimate partner violence or sexual violence from a non-partner during their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization.
she cofounded Usikimye in 2019 to rescue and assist Kenyan women who are silent victims of gender-based violence and who feel helpless and trapped in violent relationships.
She says that nothing would have prepared her then for the avalanche of cases of violence against women she deals with on a daily basis, particularly in the low-income area where she set up the organization’s offices.
Soon after setting up shop in Soweto, one of the most violent neighborhoods in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, Migwi realized that many cases of violence against women go unreported to the police. She also found that the majority of the perpetrators are never held to account, and this emboldens them to commit worse atrocities against their victims, ultimately leading to death.
Kenya made headlines in recent months after the Jan. 3 killing of Wahu Starlet, a 26-year-old sister and daughter of evangelical preachers, who was stabbed by a man alleged to belong to a criminal ring and whose members extort
expand wide and we cannot go high, we have to think about different ways of creating housing,” she said. “And what that means is infill, ADUS, looking at our occupancy laws, looking at parking minimums, and getting rid of these type of policies that makes it hard to create housing here in the community.”
Additionally, Joseph believes strategies to create more housing will benefit the environment by allowing more people to live in Boulder instead of commuting in from the suburbs or neighboring cities.
“I do believe I made the right vote for the community. What I’ve heard from them over the last few years (is) they want … clean air. And that requires for us to make different decisions,” said Joseph.
Although the 2021 Bedrooms initiative didn’t pass, many in Boulder celebrated when the city raised its occupancy limits last year. Many students and others who formerly had no choice but to live above the city’s former occupancy limits could now legally live where they did, and being in a lawful living situation gives residents more legal rights and protections.
But the decision did not come without controversy. Many residents expressed concern about heightened noise, cars, trash and crime, particularly in areas like University Hill, if occupancy limits were to increase. Some were outraged
and rape women they target through dating sites.
The suspect, John Matara, was arrested after he checked himself into a hospital with stab wounds from the confrontation with Starlet. He has been charged with rape and murder. After his identity was revealed, seven women came forward alleging he had tortured and extorted them.
The killing of Starlet, along with those of more than 31 women in January, led thousands of Kenyans to take to the streets in the country’s largest protest ever against sexual and gender-based violence.
“None of the men who killed these women are in prison ... Most of them are walking among us,” Migwi says.
Early in the pandemic, when reported genderbased violence cases in Kenya shot up by 300%, the government reactivated special desks at police stations with officers especially trained to help fast track investigations cases of into gender-based violence to give survivors justice and deter perpetrators.
But rights activists in Kenya,
that the council changed the city’s occupancy limits after voters had already rejected the Bedrooms initiative, although the ordinance that ultimately passed was not the same as what Bedrooms had proposed.
Others in the community have been, and remain, skeptical that the new ordinance would do anything to ensure affordability and have worried that landlords could raise prices on homes in response to the increased occupancy limit.
Beverly Pogreba, a longtime Boulder resident who markets and shows rental properties and whose husband is a real estate agent, said she has seen dramatic rent increases at some Boulder properties recently.
Regarding the occupancy bill, she said, “I’m not comfortable with it at all. I mean, we’re going through this in Boulder, going from three to five (people) — you see the increase (in prices), so it’ll be the same or more (if the bill passes).”
However, Pogreba noted, there are many factors that can drive the price of homes, so the price changes may not be directly connected to the city’s new ordinance. She works with landlords regularly but said none have directly told her they wanted to increase their rent based on the increased occupancy.
The occupancy bill has been introduced in the state Senate and is up for a vote in the Local Government and Housing committee on Tuesday.
many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, say those desks are no longer functional and that some of the officers in charge were frustrated over poor pay, taking out their frustrations on the survivors themselves.
Activists also point at the pervasive bribe-taking culture among members of the Kenyan police, and cases in which police officers have asked victims of gender-based violence to pay a bribe for action to be taken against the perpetrators.
Kenya police did not respond to a written request
for comment about these allegations.
Migwi says she sometimes feels she’s losing her mind by her inability to help all of the victims. But she draws inspiration from seeing some of the women she has helped reclaim their voice, start a new life and find their independence.
She recalls a meeting at a Rotary Club last week, where she was invited to give a keynote address, and met Sheila Shiyonga, a woman her organization helped rescue in 2021 from female genital mutilation her husband and his parents were forcing her to undergo.
“I thank God for Njeri, she rescued me and took me to her safe house where I stayed with my two kids for six months. She ensured my kids went to school ... and she helped me get a job,” said Shiyonga, who now works as a supervisor at a branch of one of Kenya’s leading supermarket chains.
It is the success stories like that of Shiyonga’s that give Migwi and other rights activists in Kenya the motivation to continue to fight.
“In helping others I heal myself — and I find my voice,” Migwi said.