Help for Kenya’s modern-day slaves

A conviction for trafficking in persons carries a 30-year jail term or a fine of not les than Sh30 million.   NATION MEDIA GROUP

By JOAN THATIAH AND ALAN MWENDWA
Posted  Saturday, April 13  2013 

IN SUMMARY

• Vulnerable children from poor families are still being transported to Kenya’s major towns to work as house helps. A new law promises to change all this. Might you be affected?
• A conviction for trafficking in persons carries a 30-year jail term or a fine of not les than Sh30 million.

There is loud wailing at 2am in an estate in Lang’ata. The cries wake up a few neighbours, some of whom drag themselves out of bed to peep through their windows. This has happened before, several times in fact, and most of the neighbours know exactly where the noise originates.

After a while, the wailing turns to muffled sobs, then soon stops. Those neighbours who were brave enough to venture outside to investigate exchange a few words. Most of them know what is going on, others hear the shocking story for the first time. The person wailing in the wee hours of the morning is a 13-year-old girl named Consolata.

Consolata has been living at that house for the past three years. Before that she lived with her family in Nyanza. One day, a woman visited her home and Consolata was shipped off to Nairobi the same day. According to her, the family that took her in promised to pay her school fees and look after her.

But as soon as she arrived in the city, she was put to work as a maid in the woman’s house. According to concerned neighbours and the watchman, Consolata has endured severe beatings for the past three years. The woman’s weapon of choice is a nyahunyo — a whip made from rubber.

Consolata is a victim of a practice that many people in Kenya still do not fully understand despite numerous campaigns. And until recently, even the Kenyan government seemed reluctant to address this problem: Human trafficking.

The United Nations defines human trafficking as the act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring, and receiving another person for the purpose of exploitation. The UN places the number of victims of human trafficking worldwide at 2.7 million at any given time, 80 per cent of this number being women and children.

Victims of trafficking are often made vulnerable by poverty, so perpetrators use the promise of money to hook them.

To many modern working women, trafficking is that thing that criminals do when they abduct vulnerable women and turn them into sex slaves. At best, they would describe it as employers transporting naïve women to some Middle Eastern country where they are turned into house slaves and made to live and work in the most inhumane of conditions. What many do not realise is how close human trafficking is to them.

Many years ago, it was not unusual for many town women to bring girls below the age of 18, often relatives, to their houses to care for their young children and do the housework. At the time, it was considered a gift for the girl’s family to receive a little money and the dubious privilege of “looking after her”.

However, as more women became aware that this was child labour, the practice faded… or so it seemed. These days, any woman who hires a child to work in her home does her best to cover her tracks.

Covering tracks

Take Consolata’s case, for example. According to the watchman, the woman would dress her up in old school uniforms that her children had discarded. This would give any nosy neighbours the impression that Consolata was attending school.

However this was not the case; Consolata would work from the crack of dawn until late at night and endure beatings, insults, and other forms of mistreatment.

The watchman further states that Consolata was the third child to work at the woman’s house. The girl who worked there before Consolata had received the same treatment and had eventually run away in the middle of the night. Nobody knows where she is.

So, what would cause an otherwise well-informed woman to hire a young girl to work in her home? Nora*, a 32-year-old mother of two, says that she employed a 14-year-old brought to her by a friend from upcountry to look after her firstborn son eight years ago because there was not enough space in her home for a grown woman.

“We were living in a two-room house then and I could not risk having a woman brush her skirts against my husband every time she moved around the house. Furthermore, we couldn’t afford the Sh3,000 that house girls were asking for back then. When we moved to a spacious two-bedroom house, we got an older, more responsible woman to look after the baby and clean the house,” she says.

And there are those who are ignorant about the age of the girl, such as Murugi, a travel consultant and mother-of-two, who unknowingly employed a 16-year-old girl two years ago.

“She seemed old enough and since she had been brought by a friend, I didn’t bother with her personal details. I only asked for her ID months into the job and she produced another person’s card, claiming that it was hers. Prodded, she admitted that she wasn’t old enough to acquire one.” Despite this, Murugi kept the girl for close to a year because, she says, she was efficient.

Before 2006, human trafficking as a crime punishable by law had not been addressed in Parliament. It was not until that year that organisations such as The Cradle pushed the Kenyan government to address the practice.

Sofia Rajab Leteipan, the project manager for counter trafficking in persons at The Cradle, says it took three attempts and four years to get the Counter Trafficking in Persons Bill through Parliament. “Between 2006 and 2010 we presented two Bills in Parliament and both lapsed. It wasn’t until we presented the third one that we succeeded,” she says.

Sofia says that the success of the Bill came after then nominated MP Millie Odhiambo, who is currently the member for Mbita, spearheaded their cause in Parliament.

“She was a former executive director at The Cradle and had for long campaigned to get the Bill through Parliament. But once she was nominated to the House, she was able to push the Bill much farther than was previously possible,” Sofia says.

The Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act came into effect in October last year, which means that the government can now deal with cases such as that one of 25-year-old Mueni*, an accounts clerk in Nairobi who has employed a 15-year-old girl as a live-in house help. For Sh2,500 a month, the girl looks after the woman’s two-year-old son all day, cooks, and cleans the house. Mueni knows that what she is doing is not right, but she says that she intentionally sought a young girl because she did not want to pay a lot. “Her work isn’t so good, so she cannot demand a lot of money,” she says.

In many cases, it is difficult for the “slave” to report their employer to the authorities because they often do not know that they are being trafficked, do not have the opportunity to report the case, and are afraid of the repercussions on themselves and their families back home. This, sadly, is owing to their harsh background and/or illiteracy.

Beth Karimi, now 21, is one such example. Nine years ago, she was lured from her village in Mbeere by a relative with promises of a job and possible training in Nairobi. Being the first of four children born to a single mother who brewed illicit brews to make ends meet, the Sh1,000 she was promised as starting salary seemed like a lot of money.

“My ‘employer’ seemed nice at first and promised that if I did a good job, she would pay a neighbourhood tailor to train me,” she says. Aged only 13, Beth began working as a housemaid for a family of six. She worked over 12 hours a day, cooking and cleaning after children older than her. She was denied time to interact with other children in the neighbourhood. This, she says, forced her to mature quickly.

Violation of human rights

Every couple of months, the woman would send Sh1,000 to Beth’s mother back home. Despite the false promises, ill treatment, and the exploitation, Beth could not claim her rights. “She made sure that I never forgot that she was doing me a favour by housing me, feeding, me and letting me wear hand-me-downs from her children. I believed her. From where I stood, it was one less mouth for my mother to feed.”

It all ended when Beth became pregnant by her boss’ college-going son. “She denied that her son was responsible for my pregnancy, called me a liar, and sent me packing back to the village,” Beth recalls.

According to Nairobi lawyer Kennedy Osoro, human trafficking, within and outside the country, is criminalised by Kenyan law. Whether for the purpose of exploitation through prostitution, forced labour, or drug trafficking, all human trafficking is a fundamental violation of human rights.

The Counter Trafficking in Person’s Bill has put in place stringent measures to protect the vulnerable and help the survivors of trafficking. A conviction for this crime carries a 30-year jail term or a fine of not less than Sh30 million. The Employment Act further protects children by prohibiting child labour. “To further discourage the financiers and those who abet these crimes, repeat offenders face life in prison,” Osoro explains.

Since some victims may not be aware that they are being exploited and it sometimes takes the intervention of an onlooker to rescue them, Osoro’s recommendation to a third party who suspects that someone is being trafficked is to reach out to the nearest authority — the police or the local administration. Institutions have been set up to ensure that victims are removed from these situations and either put in children’s homes or other places where their dignity can be restored.

In February this year, Consolata tried to run away from her abusive home. The watchman and concerned neighbours managed to stop her from wandering into the unfamiliar streets of Nairobi and decided that it was time to take action against her abusive employers.

After some research, the neighbours contacted Childline Kenya, an organisation that specialises in children’s cases. They called the emergency 24 -hour hotline, 116, and were directed to the district commissioner’s office as their first point of contact.

After filing a complaint, the office of the DC sent a children’s officer, who summoned the woman and her husband to explain Consolata’s case. The children’s officer also made sure that Consolata was moved to safety at Mama Ngina Children’s Home.

*Names have been changed
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