Sally: Sally Jackson, volunteer with FiLiA, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Kathomi Gatwiri. We're really pleased with the amount of work that she's done, to have time to chat with her today. She's co-founder of the Counting Dead Women Project in Kenya along with Audrey Mugeni, and also author of the book, African Womanhood and Incontinent Bodies.

She's a senior lecturer in social work and social policy, and in 2017 won the Young Kenyan of the Year award, followed in 2019 by the Early Career Research Award. So as you can see, very, very busy, lots going on. We are really pleased you've got time to join us Kathomi. 

Kathomi: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Sally: You're really welcome. So, could we start off perhaps, by talking about the work that you did for your book, and take a step back from that to when you got interested in looking at the issues around vaginal fistulas and the impact that that had on women and what started that interest for you?

Kathomi: So I grew up in Kenya and you know, the issue of obstetric fistulas and vaginal fistulas is actually quite perverse and widespread. And just a couple of years ago, actually, the First Lady in Kenya took it on as a project that she wanted to champion. Because of how perverse it was, widespread, and a lot of women, particularly poor women living in remote Kenyan villages or outside of the city, were suffering from this condition because they didn't have access to healthcare, access to safe delivery options, caesarean sections in case there was a complicated birth. 

So I just want to take a step back, and just maybe tell our listeners what obstetric vaginal fistulas are.

So a fistula is an opening. A vaginal fistula is a wound or an opening inside the woman's vagina, and it's a tear in the vagina. And obstetric vaginal fistulas are caused by prolonged or complicated labour, so it's a tear through the process of childbirth. 

What happens when there’s prolonged complicated labour, and there's a tear or an opening that's actually not addressed, medically, quickly? It leaves women who suffer it incontinent, either of urine or faeces, or sometimes both. So, a vesicovaginal fistula is the opening that leaves you leaking of urine, and a rectovaginal fistula is one that leaves you leaking with faeces, or sometimes both. 

So, sometimes this happens when a woman is not able to access a hospital, not able to access a doctor or a caesarean section, and they have to persevere with a really, really complicated birth with no medical help at all. And years ago when I was doing the research for this book, I went into a few hospitals, one in the city and one in the remote area, where I talked to women who were in the hospital receiving care for vaginal fistulas, and they were just telling me about the devastation of this condition.

Just imagine just living with a body that leaks urine and faeces every single day of your life. You know, the repercussions for your social life, for your sexual body, for your marriage, for, you know, for your ability just to be a woman and move through the world in a way that you feel dignified, you know?

So it's a condition that actually takes a lot of women's womanhood away from them in such a significant, intimate, and personal way. So for me, I was always interested in it, because it's there and has not been researched a lot and was a confronting topic, but I was able to actually place this condition within bigger structures.

You know, it wasn't just about the tear in the body. The fact that we are in the 21st century, in 20,000, you know, 2020, and women are still living for decades with a fixable condition like this. It's just indicative of some of the broader social, cultural, religious, political, and economic structures that impact on women's personal lives as well.

So it's kind of like a broad answer to the question of how I got interested in this, Sally. 

Sally: So, thinking about those women and their experience, and as you said, the quite devastating impact it has on so many areas of their life, you know, how fixable is it? You know, how simple is a repair to be performed, and then how accessible is it, to be able to get those repairs done for women in Kenya?

Kathomi: It depends. It depends on the complexity of the injury. So some fistulas are actually quite easy to fix because it's a tear, and a lot of women tear during childbirth, but if you are in a hospital with infrastructure, a doctor will be able to notice that straight away and fix it straight away for you.

But if it's a complex tear, where the woman has already been living with that for years, there's not just the tear, there's also the wound around it. There is the secondary tear, that occurs because a woman might go ahead and have another child, which might complicate the initial trauma. So it depends on the complexity of the tear in the first place, but they're very easy to fix, but the more complex ones require a couple of tries. 

So a doctor, like, I was speaking to one of the fistula doctors, fistula surgeons in Kenya, and he said to me, with some women, they just fix it with one go. And with other women, they have to keep coming for quite a while. They fix just a little bit, and they give them time to heal, and then come again and fix another part of the tear and give them time to heal. 

But the doctor also said to me that there are some tears, if they're too complex and if they've been left there to develop other complications, they actually cannot be fixed completely, but they can be managed. 

But you also asked me about the question of accessibility. That really is the problem. It's about, first of all, women having the understanding that this is fixable, and this is not a punishment to them from the gods, from culture, from their religion. Because, you know, they think they've been bad, or because they think they've not been good enough women. 

First of all, just moving from those cultural nuances of, you know, what most women told me is quite a strange disease. You know, they haven't seen other women with it, and they're worried, “why is it them, why me,” you know? 

So there are those supernatural cultural nuances that women use to explain why they got it in the first place. So there's that, which complicates access to healthcare because people think, because it's a supernatural condition, then it requires supernatural responses to fix, which obviously is not true.

And then there is the other issue of accessibility, which is socioeconomic. I mean, a lot of women who develop fistulas, obviously, like I said before, women who already do not have a lot of access to healthcare, because of where they live or because of their finances or because of their, you know, situations of where they are in their lives.

So even knowing that it could be fixed, but the actual physical act of affording that surgery to go and fix it, and going there, and having a support system to be there with you, is actually some of the underlying factors of how complex accessibility actually is. And even though in Kenya, the biggest hospital, Kenyatta Hospital, it actually provides free fistula surgeries for women, not a lot of women are able to go there because transport, because of where they live. I met one woman who had travelled for four days, just to get to the nearest clinic so that they could ask for help. So these are the kind of challenges and complexities that really impact on the ability of women to actually seek help.

Sally: And, does that issue around transport also reflect on the reasons why so many women experience fistula during childbirth, because of access to care actually during the childbirth itself? 

Kathomi: Absolutely. Because if you think, you're going to have to travel for a week to get to a hospital, and for most women it's walking, or have to wait on the one bus that comes to your village maybe every couple of days…

You know, I always give the example of a girl I interviewed, who we’ll name Sasha, and I've written a couple of papers about her because I found her story to be quite shocking, you know? And when I met her, she was 22, but she developed fistula when she was about 11, because she'd been married off when she was about nine.

So by the time she got pregnant, she didn't even know really what was happening to her body. Yeah, she was just confused, what is this thing? And she'd been taken away from her family and married off to this older man. So when the time came for her to give birth, when she was 11, she couldn't really access any transport. They lived very far away from the nearest, not even the nearest hospital, the nearest dispensary clinic that doesn't even offer a lot of, you know, surgical interventions medically. So she was supported by what we call midwives or traditional birth attendants to give birth, but her child was actually positioned wrong inside her.

So instead of the head coming out first, legs and all the other parts of the body, you know, started to emerge, and the baby was just stuck and couldn't come out, and there was nothing these women could do. They tried, and the baby was just trapped there until it died, and it was trapped there for almost six days. And it was only able to come out in a rotten, macerated form afterwards, and it had to be vacuumed out.

This is a kind of trauma. I really should have started with a trigger warning. And this is a kind of trauma some of these women have experienced. So by the time all those things had to be vacuumed out of her body and cleaned out, she developed such severe fistula, you know, she was leaking both vaginally and rectally.

She was 22 when I met her, so she'd lived with this condition for more than 10 years. But because she was so young, she didn't even have an understanding of her own body at that time. She just thought she was cursed. She thought it's because she wasn't a good enough wife. She thought it's because she'd done something wrong and she was being punished, and her husband kept repeating that social messaging.

You know, “what is wrong with you, other women, you know, other girls your age are able to give their husbands children, but you can't, so there's something wrong with you.” And I think that messaging, particularly for such a small child, don't want to call her a woman because she was a child. 

And really, really strong. She was only in her twenties actually when she went. Someone went to their village actually, with messages about fistulas and then that's when she was able to know that there's actually medical help that can be offered to her, but because of the complexity of her fistula, it had to be done, you know, incrementally. And there were chances that it would, it was never really ever going to be fixed. 

So long story short, she wasn't able to access transport, so she wasn't able to go to a hospital to give birth, where she could access a caesarean or something like that. So all those things for me, when I look at them, they're all preventable. They can be fixed, in a hospital, or they're preventable. 

But we are talking about accessibility and women being denied the right to actually access proper respectful maternal healthcare, which actually just extends to them losing their bodies and losing their lives, while they're trying to give life, which is quite paradoxical. Yeah.

Sally: And I, yeah, as you say, I can't even begin to imagine the trauma of that experience for that child, going through that. And is that an impact as well? The fact that you are having children giving birth, is part of the rationale or reasoning for vaginal fistulas in the first place?

The fact that the body's not ready yet, you know, the pelvis hasn't developed enough and et cetera, to be able to go through childbirth without complications?

Kathomi: Oh yeah. And even fully developed women, it is still challenging,  you know, they still have challenges and there's so much complexities around childbirth, and I think there's this dominant narrative that moves around a lot, like childbirth is a wonderful experience and, you know, and you get to experience these beautiful things because you're just about to connect with your new human. But for most women, it's just not that. It's a excruciating, humiliating, deeply, deeply traumatic experience. 

And you're right, when that experience is now on a child, it's even amplified manifold because the body is just not ready to take that kind of trauma. Because to be honest, I don't know who is, and when it's an 11 year old, it's tough.

So we see how cultural nuances, like early marriage and even female genital, you know, mutilation play a part in exacerbating or contributing to the issue of vaginal fistulas in community. 

But I have to say, one of the biggest issues that I found was actually structural and systemic. Yes, absolutely. So the cultural aspect could actually be mitigated sometimes, if there was proper access to care, because you can give birth safely, or you can have all that medical support even when you are young and trying to give birth. So some of these things can be mitigated by a working system, but both are quite problematic, which makes it more complex.

Sally: And you mentioned earlier about, I think it was, was it the First Lady that was doing some work and had a campaign around this? I wondered, how is the government in Kenya responding to this? 

Kathomi: So I think, after quite a lot of backlash, she's actually not doing it anymore. Because Kenyans are just, you know, she was organising campaigns and marathons and, you know, to raise funds to build mobile clinics, to take so remote women could actually access reproductive and maternal healthcare.

But I think the response from the Kenyans was like, you are basically the richest family in the country, and you are asking us to fund you to go and pop up, you know, mobile clinics in remote areas. You should just use the money that is being stolen through your government to actually build proper hospitals, and pay doctors well and have proper, you know, reproductive health education in the education system.

So people were frustrated, because they felt this was actually a band-aid response, whereas there was a lot of corruption and a lot of money being stolen. Money that could be used to build hospitals, and build proper schools, and keep girls in schools, and do all those things. So that is where the backlash came from, because people were like, “oh, we could have long-term solutions, not just band-aid solutions.”

And I don't think she does it anymore, but during the time when I was collecting this data for my PhD, I know she was, you know, strong in it and doing a lot of advocacy and campaigns. And during that time there was a lot of momentum, in creating partnerships with local hospitals to treat women. But I haven't been in Kenya for a while to monitor how that has been progressing through her campaign at the moment.

Sally: So hopefully some of that has been sustained, but yeah, as you say, we'll kind of see how much difference it makes in the longer term. 

Kathomi: Yeah. Yeah. I guess both could have been, you know, yeah. Rather than a case of just discarding one, I think both could have functioned side by side together, in my opinion.

You know, while we are waiting to build on the long-term solutions, and build hospitals and do all those things, we can still be doing these, you know, short-term responses to curate people's pain and support them in the meantime. So, yeah. 

Sally: And so from that, obviously after the work and your PhD is that when you… I'm just interested, co-founding this Counting Dead Women project for Kenya. What was it that then got your interest in violence against women and girls? Although, you know, from what you've told me, the issues around vaginal fistulas kind of are, in themselves, a form of violence against women and girls with the child marriage and et cetera. But is that how you started to sort of think more widely about violence against women and girls? 

Kathomi: Yes, I would say that it's always been ever-present in my life anyway. I think for most women it is, you grow up observing. And sometimes it might not be as extreme as some of the stories that I've shared, but I guess when your eyes are open enough, you can see those subtle microaggressions and violences, you know, that women experience in the way people talk to them, treat them, respond to them. And certainly, for me as I was growing up, it was very obvious. 

And so I guess part of my desire to do this kind of work was really, I just didn't want to live that kind of life. And I thought, what can I do? And because I've got privilege of having an education, and having a platform, and having a voice. How can I respond to some of those things in a more practical way? 

So the issue of Counting Dead Women actually didn't come to be until end of 2018. Because there was such a surge in women being killed in Kenya. There was also a surge in women being killed in Australia, you know. So I didn't know what was going on, I was really frustrated, and every time I tried to have a conversation with people about, “are you noticing this? Or is it getting worse? Or what's happening?” And particularly men would always just go, “oh, men too get killed,” you know, it was always those derailment of the conversation. Or they would say, “there's no proof,” or, “it's not an issue,” or, “what did that woman do to deserve that?” You know? Or, “she was sleeping with a married man, what does she expect?” So there was a lot of gaslighting in those conversations, to be honest. And then I decided, if it's proof they want, it's proof they'll get, you know?

And I just decided, “what is a practical platform in which I can show the numbers in real time as they come through?” And you know, Audrey and I, and we've got another member who actually helps us to put everything together, doesn't like to be named a lot. And we started this, and we started counting, and we were shocked, you know, because once you start actually actively looking, you notice how much bigger the problem actually is.

So we started collecting, but our method of data collection, I guess, is a bit problematic, because we don't have all the information and there's so many women whose stories don't make it out into the media. So the way we collect data is by curating all the information that makes it into the local daily newspapers, or ‘counting newspapers’ as we call them in Kenya, any murder that has been reported about a woman, would collect that and put it in one central platform. 

So that people can see, it's not just one woman there and another one there, and it's all scattered. I wanted people to put it together, to see that this is actually, to be honest, a public health issue. And it's a gendered issue, it's a violence issue, it's a trauma issue. There's so many things that are just so attached to the issue of femicide. 

Sally: And what sort of information are you gathering around the murders? So, and I really understand, obviously if you are collecting it from various sources, newspapers, and et cetera, you may not be able to get all the information that you want to, but what sort of things are you thinking about gathering? Yeah, I'm just wondering if you're noticing any patterns? 

Kathomi: Hmm. So that's a really good question. 

So what I collect is their names, their stories, why they were murdered, basically to try and put a narrative to the murder. And sometimes that's difficult because I found in most cases, they don't name the woman, they name the potential murderer. They name him. They give him a name. They have this humanised approach towards the person who perpetrated the murder. And then when referring to the woman, they would say, “the woman”, “the wife”. You know, there was no context to who she was as a person, so I found that quite frustrating. Or she, you know, some stories would say, “the woman, who was known as a troublemaker,” and I'm like, “what has that got to do with anything?” you know, someone has just been murdered. Or, “the woman, who was found to have an affair.” 

You know, so there are all these nonsensical things that would be attached to the narrative. And from my perspective, they're just about shaming the woman, and almost implicitly suggesting that because of their behaviour, because of who they are, because of their personality, their loud mouth, they somehow invited this upon themselves.

That is what I was collecting, some of what was being said and what was not being said. But we tried, a lot, to put a name to most of the women's stories. And sometimes I would ask Audrey to actually write to the editors and say, “do we have a name for this woman?” 

Because we want to name them. Because we want their names, when we actually put this data in a proper database, we want those names to be there and we don't want them to be just known as another statistic or another number. Unfortunately, there is such a biased way in which some of these cases are reported, and that makes it difficult for us to collect the information that's actually meaningful and useful, yeah.

Sally: That seems to be a global issue, doesn't it? Around saying her name, you know, remembering her as an individual woman, with a life, who's a daughter, a sister, a mother. And as you mentioned earlier, actually humanising her so that she's seen as a person that's been killed rather than “the wife of”. 

Kathomi: Yeah. And it's funny how most murderers are humanised. “Oh, he's just a good bloke that snapped, you know, yeah, he's a family man who loved his family,” and so there's a lot of that effort to try… and I don't know – actually, I don't want to say, “I don't know where it comes from”. Of course I know where it comes from, because the patriarchy drives the narratives in how the stories of men and women are actually told in mainstream media. 

So… you asked about some of the common themes that I've picked up from the reasons why these women are actually killed. And to be honest, that was one of the most difficult parts of starting this project, is actually to read the reasons why. Not that any reasons is ever justified, in any way, shape, or form, but I guess seeing, in real time, the nonsensical reasons why women were actually being killed was really difficult to deal with. From, “she came home late,” to, “she didn't serve my dinner on time,” to, “she laughed at me,” to, “she didn't answer my phone call,” to, “I've been calling her, and she ignored me.” 

You know, what comes to mind is actually a particular story of a guy who traveled. It wasn't even the partner. It was a guy wooing a lady who clearly wasn't interested, and he sent her some money over the phone, I think for her birthday, and I think she didn't respond because she didn't ask for it. And then because he didn't get a response, or clearly what he was hearing was a rejection, he actually travelled almost 500 kilometres with an axe, and went and killed her in broad daylight as she was, you know, walking with her friends on the street.

Those are some of the reasons why actually women are actually being killed. I think coming face to face with the violence of misogyny is such a difficult thing, sometimes, for me to process logically. Why sometimes the life of a woman is worth less than the ego of a man, is worth less than someone's dinner, or someone's joke.

And to me, some of the conclusions that I was coming to, is that women's lives are a joke, you know, in most people's minds. You know, particularly in a patriarchal system, where a woman's life is only as valuable, (as) the man beside her, as the motherhood, you know, journey. She's not complete by herself. 

And I think that devaluation of women's lives, and women's bodies, contributes to this issue just not being taken seriously, either by the government or through policy. 

Sally: How do you look after yourself when, you know, having to read through and look at the detail of, you know, the different murders, and as you say, the complete lack of value that's put on women's lives? 

Kathomi: I haven't done it this year, for maybe three months. I've asked my colleague to do it, and we just alternate that way. So, she does it for a while, and I do it for a while, and we alternate, and we give each other a break outside of that violence and outside of that space.

We would also debrief a lot, you know, talking about some of these things. But I think also, the more we confronted the reality of the scope of the violence that we were reading about, I think the more energised we got. In being able to also lobby for change and put campaigns out there and, you know, start having conversations with people about, you know, “you asked for proof, we have proof now. Now what have you got to say about it?” Because we saw there was a real need and a real gap to do that.

But in terms of self-care, it's really, really important, because it's really easy to be vicariously traumatised through the stories of these women who's been so violently taken away from us. 

And also to see some men coming on board as well, and being part of the conversation has also been heartening, although, you know, there's also been a lot of pushback and resistance as well, as we can expect, I guess. Yeah.

Sally: So when, you know, one argument previously has been, “show me, you know, show me the proof, show me the data.” People then get really upset when you do show them the data, don't they? Because it makes it more difficult for them to argue against it. 

Kathomi: Yeah. Well, you asked for logic rather than, you know, here is the logic and here is the data and here the stats and…

And then now the pushback becomes really personal, “you women are really angry about everything.” You know, it's derailed now from the actual conversation, into personal attacks because the bigger scope, the bigger conversations obviously cannot be had logically because in the presence of stats and data. That is not something that particularly worries me. You know, the work needs to be done.

Sally: I think it's positive that we're seeing this work now being done across the world in different countries. In the UK we have a wonderful Karen Ingala-Smith, who runs the Counting Dead Women Project here in the UK. There's similar work in France, in Canada, obviously yourselves in Kenya. So we're starting to get that data on a more global perspective as well as each of the different countries. 

Kathomi: And I'm hoping that maybe we'll work together, you know, in solidarity, to actually create a global platform with which we can work. Cause actually, as you say, this idea was not my own, I was just mimicking what was already happening here in Australia. We've got Counting Dead Women Australia, and I wrote to them and I said, “I want to start, you know, something like this in Kenya because the violence there is shocking.” And they said, “sure, this is how you do it.” So I guess, in the first instance I got some advice from the Australian version on how that could work in a Kenyan context, and I did it.

So it's good to see women are just so tired of waiting for more response, you know, for better policy, you know, for help, and they're just deciding to do it by themselves, so that they can actually get more people to listen and respond to what they need. 

Sally: So thinking of our listeners, what could they do?

Cause I always think, you know, when we're learning, we're sharing women's stories, we're looking and delving into the impact of the patriarchy on women's lives. There needs to be a kind of a, “so what?” to that, you know, what action are we taking to improve it? What would be your ask of any women listening to this, that they either think about or do as a result of the work that you've done, and the learning that you've had?

Kathomi: I think my response will be divided maybe in two. First it'll be a personal response, and then the other one will be a little bit more systemic or institutional. 

And the first response to that will be personal, meaning, it is really, really important when we do this kind of work, when we are starting to notice the impact of the patriarchy, the violence of the patriarchy on women's lives, on women's bodies, on women's careers, that we remember, personally, we have value and we love ourselves. 

And the idea of self-love for me is actually radical. To love yourself within a context that is so violent, that continually tells you you’re worthless, and you don't have much value unless it is attached to something else, is actually a radical act. And I wish more women, particularly who feel they're not able to have any kind of response in an institutional way or an organisational way, to know that loving themselves and resisting the microaggressions of patriarchy through self-love is actually powerful, powerful response to this. 

And so women should not feel like, “oh, because I don't have an organisation, and because I don't do this, then I'm not contributing anything to the fight.” No. 

It is always fascinating – not fascinating, but I always think if we can love ourselves enough, love for the self, love for our bodies, love for our fellow sisters and fellow women, if we can hold onto that, I think that's such a powerful response, and it is scary. There is nothing more scary to the patriarchy than solidarity of women together, and that is why feminism has been fought, and fought, and fought for decades, because it is an organisation that reminds, it is a movement that reminds women to love themselves, to care for themselves, to care for other women, and to look at misogyny and the patriarchy in the eye and say, “you don't scare me,” or, “you scare me, but I'm still going to do my life anyway.” 

So for me, I think that personal aspect of redeeming and reclaiming ourselves within the context of our culture, and to not feel inferiorised by it, or diminished by it, or humiliated by it, and reclaiming that in power and agency, I think is really, really important. 

Sally: So important, and thank you so much for reminding us all about some of the things that we can all do that, you know, together make a big difference. And one of our central tenets at FiLiA is ‘Sisterhood and Solidarity’, and, you know, that absolutely, you know, together we make so much more difference, don't we? 

Kathomi: Absolutely, and you know what, you know what? Like I said before, sisterhood and solidarity are scary to the patriarchy, because the patriarchy has survived on the silence of women, that we are able to be silent about their atrocities and the violence of men in our lives. 

Domestic violence, oh, we keep quiet about it. We’re insulted and catcalled, you know, on the street, we keep quiet about that because we don't want to be, you know, we don't want to be troublemakers. Most of this has actually thrived and been sustained by our silence, and that is why us raising our voice in solidarity and sisterhood is actually really, really powerful, within the context of doing that kind of work.

And I think also, women just being together and forming partnerships together, I think it also breaks that dominant myth that women are their own worst enemies. I don't know whether that's a dominant thing that is in the UK a lot, but definitely where I grew up, we were told, “women are their own worst enemies.”

And I just want to encourage women to say, “actually, no,” you know, there is nothing more powerful, more revolutionary than women working together, and being in sisterhood and in solidarity together, and they do great, great, great things, so…

Sally: Absolutely, absolutely. 

Kathomi: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Sally: So Kathomi, what's next for you then? Where is your next piece of work then? Because as said right at the beginning, you've achieved so much already that, you know, the world is going to benefit for many, many, many years, the wonderful work and activism that you are involved in. But I wonder what's on the horizon for you? 

Kathomi: Oh, good question.

I have stopped planning since Covid-19. I'm like, what is this life even, you know? But I actually don't know. I've been working really hard on a research project here in Australia that is mostly about articulating, theorising, and writing about the experiences of African immigrants in Australia.

And talking about racialised trauma a lot, and the experiences that follow us in other countries. And what's that about? So, I've been writing a lot about that. I’m in the process of putting another book together, but this is mostly about Black bodies in white countries, and how those bodies are read, how they're stratified, how they're ranked, how they're hyper-visible or invincible in the same way, how they're criminalised, you know, there's so many aspects of this research that are actually really exciting to write about, particularly as a Black person myself. I can really, you know, feel the personal coming through from the stories of all my research participants, and I can relate to all of that. 

So that is what I've been working on, and that's my project for the year, at least for now. And then teaching, and maybe when we are allowed to get on planes again, you know, then I'll be very, very interested in doing some work outside Australia and outside Kenya as well. Moving around, talking to other women, listening to other women, and seeing what they're actually doing, how they're changing the world, and sharing my knowledge and ideas with others as well.

But to be honest, not a solid plan. I'm just really immersed in the research at the moment, and that's what I'm doing. And then we'll wait for 2020 to end. And then maybe there will be an opportunity to think more broadly about other things from next year. 

But I think I also wanted to mention about, since we are talking about Covid 19, or I brought it up, in the context of femicide, how we've noticed with our counting, there's been a spike of women being killed during lockdown. And it's not surprising. A lot of women actually do not find their homes to be safe. They go to work, they go to their friends. You know, all those other interactions are safe for them. But for a lot of women, homes are not safe, particularly if they're having to be locked down with an abuser or the perpetrator of violence. So we've seen a spike in those. 

But also the other contradiction that we are seeing in Kenya is because the government said that people need to be buried quickly. So that mortuaries are not overwhelmed, just in case the pandemic ends up killing a lot of people. So what we've been noticing is that even though there's a spike, there's also seems to be a paradoxical drop, which is quite interesting.

And what Audrey and I are thinking is that women are being killed in their homes. But because the government is giving people two days to bury loved ones, and with only a maximum of five people in a burial gathering, there's actually not enough time to reflect on, “why is she dead?” you know, “what happened to her?”

Because those kind of investigations are actually now through the window, you know, and a woman can just be killed at her home and be buried the next day, and nobody will bat an eyelid because everybody will say, “oh, she was sick.” So that's the contradiction that we are seeing, between this spike and drop, spike and drop within our data collection.

Because now the deaths are no longer being reported as femicide because now we've moved to this big thing, which is the pandemic, that it's almost not being reported anymore. Does that make sense?

Sally: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's such an opportunity to cause violence with the isolation, but then to hide that violence with not having to report the cases.

And I think one of the things, likewise in the UK we've seen an increase in femicide, but also we're very concerned about the end of the lockdown, when women can escape, because obviously that's such a threat to perpetrators, that we're envisaging there will be a, you know, another increase again, you know, towards the end of the lockdown as women are able, perhaps, to start accessing support or safety.

Kathomi: That's such an interesting point. Is there any particular work you guys are doing there in preparation for that kind of a spike, as lockdown comes to an end?

Sally: Well, we're in lobbying hard with government to increase funding because we've not got enough, you know, safe spaces and et cetera. We've had some announcements in the last week about an increase in funding.

But as is often the way at the moment, we've been told that the funding is coming, but we've not been given the detail of where that goes and who has it. So we're kind of waiting to find out, and one of the issues for us in the UK as well, is we found over the last few years of austerity, the women's sector has lost a, you know, significant chunk of funding, but especially the specialist services for Black and minoritised communities have lost funding and really their services have been decimated. So we're specifically asking for additional funding for those services because, you know, obviously it's within these services that women from Black and minoritised communities feel that they have some trust, will find workers that can speak their language, will find workers that understand the cultural needs as well as the physical and safety needs. So it's so imperative that we get the money to all services, but specifically to those services as well. 

It's something that FiLiA is lobbying the government to ensure, as part of the domestic abuse bill that's going through at the moment, that we have much better provision for minoritised communities and particularly migrant women.

Kathomi: Oh, what a good point. And I guess it just goes to show how much intersectional violence is, and how it's not only gendered, it's also racialised, and it depends on someone's intersection. People who exist at different intersections of different gender, race, you know, sexual orientation, or disability, or age, aboriginality, are at a higher risk already of experiencing violence, but also the irony around that are also more likely to receive help when they do experience that violence. And definitely here in Australia, we do see it. When we see a case of criminalisation of indigenous women or even death, either by state, you know, murder by state, and how those stories are reported, you can see how devalued their lives are within a broader, structural, systemic, thoroughly racialised context. And that's always difficult to understand how violence is actually compounded by all these other minoritised identities. So yeah. 

Sally: It'll be interesting times ahead, I think. In some ways, one of the bizarre positives that's come out of Covid is that, in the UK certainly, people are talking a lot more about violence against women, and about the impacts, and about the lack of services, and the lack of response that we currently have, but it's whether or not that will translate into action that we don't know yet. And I'm ever hopeful that it will. But I think it's, you know, in some ways it's easy for governments to promise a lot. I'm always interested in what they actually deliver. 

Kathomi: Yeah, absolutely. I think there might be a tendency to over-promise things at the moment as a way to give people hope, and the implementation always really is where it really matters.

There's a lot of work to do, in essence 

Sally: Yeah, there always seems to be. But Kathomi, it's been so interesting speaking to you today. I really appreciate you taking the time and I hope it's not the last time that we interact, and perhaps we'll see you at a FiLiA conference one day, talking about some of your research.

Kathomi: That would be nice. I would be more than happy to come.

Sally: Yeah, that would be fabulous. 

Kathomi: Cause it's always wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to connect with women globally who are doing interesting, wonderful, radical stuff. That's always welcome.

Sally: Well you take care of yourself, and as I say, we look forward to working with you again, because it's been just delightful talking with you today.

Kathomi: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sally, for having me. 

Sally: You're welcome.