Male Engagement Remains Key In Fighting Gender based violence

By Isabella Maua

There is a need to engage and fully involve men in gender-based violence talks so as to achieve gender equity and empower all women and girls.

In the quest to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5, it becomes difficult to focus on girls and women without necessarily enlightening the would-be perpetrators who are probably men or boys.

Speaking during the PMA Agile Bungoma County Gender norms and GBV dissemination meeting last week, Prof. Peter Gichangi revealed that close to 50% of partnered women experienced physical, sexual, and or emotional intimate partner violence in the past year.

“From the women we interviewed aged between the reproductive age of 18 and 49 in selected households, 47.3% admitted to having faced violence from their partners who were men,” noted Prof. Gichangi.

According to the report released in November, 14.8% of IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) survivors sought informal support by speaking to a relative, with 10.1% speaking to a friend.

Among the women interviewed, it was found that fewer women in Bungoma owned tech devices as compared to the overall sample; 11.1% did not own a phone, while 10.3% did not have M-Pesa.

16.7% of partnered women in Bungoma also admitted to experiencing different types of reproductive coercion in the past year, with 12.3% being made to feel bad or treated badly for wanting to use family planning.

“9.4% of the women we interviewed were either forced or pressured to become pregnant; 4.1% were threatened with being left by their partners, while 4.9% had their partners take away their family planning or kept them away from going to the clinic to get family planning,” divulged Prof. Gichangi.

Despite the fact that women can only gain the value from tech by accessing it safely, almost a third of women in Bungoma experienced some form of tech-facilitated abuse where perpetrators were most often partners.

With the rather higher level of GBV mostly experienced among women, only 1 in 5 IPV survivors sought help from formal services: 4.1% sought shelter services, 4.7% from police, 2.3% from legal services, and 7.5% seeking counselling.

Janet Khisa, Bungoma County GBV Programme officer, cited the need for police officers and community health workers to build confidence in the people so as to attract more reporting of GBV cases.

“We have engaged the national police service in most of our programs, and we hope the narrative will change and we shall see more people coming out to report cases since it’s obvious from the findings that many have gone unreported,” stated Khisa.

Moses Chebonya, County Director for Gender, also accentuated the need for male inclusion in guidance and counselling as well as conflict resolution sessions right from the village level.

The survey was conducted by the International Centre for Reproductive Health – Kenya in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, Kenyatta University, Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the National Council for Population and Development as well as Center for Global Women’s Health & Gender Equity at JHU.