The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders or simply the Bangkok Rules comes up in every conversation we as the CleanStart team have with most of who we engage.
Yesterday at the Leaders'Quest Lunch, it came up a few times. Guests from what I can only call 'functional countries' struggle to comprehend how our side of the world works. Why such rules are in place but constantly overlooked.
As Wangari Maathai says somewhere in this book... Africa still operates like in the colonial era. The problem is that the white colonialists handed over to black colonialists.
If the government were to be strict with what they put in place as the law, an eight year old girl running away from abusive relatives wouldn't be locked up three years in a rehabilitation centre. There are non-custodial measures put in place by the United Nations to protect such girls. But because my country thrives on corruption not good leadership, she's imprisoned.
Then they deny her good food, appropriate counseling, sanitary towels and beat her up if she doesn't 'work' as hard as expected. This I have learnt depends on whatever mood their 'teachers' are in. Imagine an eight year old without parents going through that. Will she be 'rehabilitated' by the end of her three year sentence? I highly doubt.
And even they manage to instill enough fear in her to never think of running from home again, they will set free a more imprisoned version of herself than the one they imprisoned in the first place.
These conversations happened in between this lunch and a bus ride towards Dagoretti Girls Rehabilitation Centre as we were readying our guests for what was up ahead.
Most of our guests including them suggest that we should seek out Amnesty International because of the Human Rights violation breach. But those guys are already aware and trying to deal with corruption first which is the best course of action if anyone asked me.
Corruption is the only reason nothing works as it should here. It's the reason we have more than 500 children between the ages of 0-5 years serving sentences with their mothers in prisons with no budget allocation of anything at all.
It's also why the girls we visited yesterday rarely get sanitary towels or enough food. Somehow everyone in the chain of command wants to milk something out of the post they are in and by the time the resources are getting to the person who needs it most, it's never enough.
This can't be fixed overnight so we are taking things one step at a time. And even as we are doing this, we move in stealth mode as we don't want to piss off some sleeping hungry lions.
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Thank you for coming.
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