Victims of Rape & their Endless search for Justice

Time check. 9.00 am. The venue is an unfamiliar one, I am at the Chief Magistrates Court in Mpigi. This is a small court outside the heart of Mpigi town, at the tail end of a fairly modern winding road that has recently been tarmacked. As I sat in the small patio adjacent to the two courtrooms, many things became apparent and couldn’t go unnoticed. The glow of the rising sun, the helter-skelter movement of the court officers and the distraught look on the faces of the clients as they stood each absorbed in their own worries. For a moment I wondered where their imaginations were. They were definitely knee-deep in the mire of thought.

The rays that pierced through the small openings in the courtroom wall reminded me of my own days as a little boy, when I would stand in the doorway on mornings like these to play with the intermittent rays that came down in slants to form silhouettes. I sat and watched as the large glowing sphere rose slowly into the dull morning sky, it illuminated everyone around, young and old, male or female, and it did so without discrimination. I stared at the radiant sky as the big ball of fire climbed higher and higher into the sky, the morning was beautiful but it did little to reflect on the contorted faces of those that towered over me.

In that small little corridor where we struggled to fit, the court rooms were conspicuously visible but the Chief Magistrates Office need extra attention to notice. A few metres away, there lay a barely noticeable room which as I was to later learn housed suspects as they waited to be arraigned in court. There was nothing attractive about it and it could ideally go unnoticed on any normal day.

Tick…tock…tick…tock my small watch was counting down every minute, there was a growing urgency in me, a kind of eagerness that kept me expectant. All eyes were riveted towards the gate, as the vehicle carrying suspects was expected in any time. It is after they arrive at court that it will begin. An old lady was sitted next to me, her face slackened, her brow furrowed, her eyes darting with concern, searching from one place to another as if expecting something. I couldn’t guess with precision what she was expecting, but whatever it was, it caused her concern! I was to later learn that her daughter had been defiled and for a year plus she had been on a long, winding and treacherous road, one that leads to justice. She was nowhere close!

My concentration shifted to our client, Mary. Her story is also one of those painful ones that mothers in this nation have gone on to endure day in day out. One evening, an unfortunate occurrence happened to Mary’s daughter and it was for that single reason that we were sharing a seat that morning. As she returned home from a party, Mary’s daughter was defiled by a boda-boda man, one she had trusted to take her home. She was abandoned in a thicket in the dead of the night and left to figure out her way home. The girl was only 17. She was only lucky that a civil society organization (Center for Health, Human Rights & Development Center for Health, Human Rights & Development) was implementing some of its activities in the district of Gomba and that is how they learnt of the case. The accused’s family had employed all tactics, trying to box the complainant into a corner to accept being paid off but she had a bigger force behind her and she could therefore not succumb.

I shudder to imagine how many more girls are made to go through similar excruciating and harrowing experiences, and because the accused can afford to pay them off they simply have no option. The court process is (deliberately) long and tiring, adjournment after another and the hope of getting justice always vanishes with each passing day. The undertaking of having to recount the experience to ‘strangers’ in a court room is to say the least, traumatizing. Majority of those who suffer sexual and gender based violence are from the lowest strata in the community and because their voices are not heard, they let those with power dictate proceedings. Those wielding power use it to the disadvantage of the poor and in the end it is a chain of avoidable suffering.

Luc Huyse in his book All Things Pass, Except the Past famously said, “Justice is for the rich and forgiveness for the poor”. As a society, we ought to reject what is not right, stand for truth and let justice prevail.