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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Even If You Don’t Want They Will Still Do It Anyway!

Men are really strange animals. To most of them the crime of rape is nothing more than a joke. Something to snicker about and wink to your friends. That is until it is their sister or their mother or their wife who has been raped.

I am a man but to me there is no crime that is worse than rape. In my book it is better to get killed than to live with scars of rape.

Somebody confided in me a while back about her rape ordeal and it has never left my mind. The man who did it to her was a stranger who cornered her in broad daylight on some deserted footpath. He held a very sharp knife right next to her neck. The sheer horror of is still with her to this day.

But what comes later is worse. Much worse. For a woman to get any justice she will have to recount the ordeal several times. In one interesting case involving a young member of the famous Kennedy family who had been charged with rape, defence lawyers asked her whether she was wet down there when penetration took place. All this may be very entertaining to most men but to a rape victim it is a never-ending nightmare.

Yesterday students at Kenyatta University (a campus that has a long history of being the most peaceful within reach of Nairobi) went on the rampage causing destruction. Some unfortunate female students were then raped by riot police who were called in. It is said that on arriving at the scene, scores of red-bereted GSU headed straight for the women’s halls. And yet that was NOT the centre of the storm.

This brings back to memory the ordeal many women went through during the post election troubles. And the saddest thing of all is that a vast majority of these women will never get justice. So would you blame them for taking the law into their own hands?

The crime of rape is the height of impunity. Ordinary folk in Kenya (both men and women) have a pretty good idea of what it feels like to be raped. You see we the people of Kenya have been raped for a long time now by our so called leaders and we are yet to see any justice. They know very well what we don’t want but they still do it anyway. Tuta-do?

News Extra

Cell phones get stolen a lot. And that is why a new service that I have just heard about should make a huge difference. Dubbed Ujanja, the service uses satellite technology to track a telephone (or even a laptop) to it’s exact location. What happens is that after some software has been downloaded to your phone, the minute it is stolen an sms will be sent immediately to a cell phone of your choice (either your spouses or your friend.). The sms will contain vital information including the new sim card number that has been inserted into your stolen phone and the location of the phone. All this makes recovery very easy.

I am thinking that this is the kind of service that has the potential of ridding us of phone thieves (which is a very big business in Kenya these days). You can get more information on this interesting new service HERE.