Noisy Silence

It has taken me a pretty long time to sit down on my computer again and talk about women issues.  I can barely understand what is going on in my life as a woman, it’s that time I contemplate and wonder if I truly adhere to what I stand for. You know that nagging feeling that is always tormenting you every time you read or hear a woman’s story and not being able to help? Well, it descended on me today when I tried to read rape stories from around Africa.

Forget the sugar-coated Kenyan stories you here in your day to day life, because as a people we tend to sweep rape cases under the rug and only talk about it in hushed tones and whispers, in most cases if not all we are always trying to see what the victims fault is in the whole matter.

Even the young boys are being blamed nowadays for bending wrongly while cleaning the church justifying any form of sexual harassment and assault they go through in the hands of a perpetrator in this case a priest or clergy man.

Recently within my school campus an alleged rape occurred where four security guards are rumored to have assaulted and defiled a 1^st year student but guess what, keyboard warriors took it to social media pages affiliated with the university and began a myriad of questions based on timelines and victim’s inability to raise alarm in a hostel with a population above 700 persons.

Let me bring you up to speed on something that you all know but want to ignore so badly, in the state of fear your body chemistry changes. Some of us may be courageous enough to think straight and see our way out, but what about those who can’t? Or we who think we can overcome only because we have never been in real time situations such as rape?  Talk is cheap, as I always say and until you experience certain situations all you can do is talk.

In the heat of the moment a lot goes through your nervous system and whatever your brain processes first becomes your immediate line of action. For some of us screaming is the 1^st instinct while for others it’s submission with the hope that they don’t get hurt or some other escape route. This brings me to the definition of rape which is basically termed as non-consensual sex.

So, get this straight. Whether your victim screams or not, that’s rape, whether it is reported immediately or after months; still rape!! Whether your victim was naked or fully clothed, you got it rape!! Drunken sex with no consent? Rape my friend, it is still rape! Regardless of the situation surrounding any form of assault, it is never the victim’s fault.

Same applies to marital rape, this is something I have talked about before and I am still here creating awareness and condemning the act as I would any other form of sexual and gender based violence perpetrated against the girl child.

Today as we celebrate  the international day of the girl child remember to keep the girl child near you safe as we soldier on to the 16 days if activism against sexual and gender based violence later in the year specifically from the 25^th of November to the 10^th of December.  In other news, I am happy women in Saudi Arabia can now drive. It means a lot for the women of Saudi to achieve such a milestone towards liberation.