According to the UN Children’s Bureau, one in eight girls and young women have experienced rape and sexual abuse, with sub-Saharan Africa recording the highest percentage of victims.
In sub-Saharan nations where there is conflict and insecurity, one in five girls have been sexually assaulted or raped before turning 18, according to UNICEF’s first-ever global estimate on sexual violence against children.
“It’s terrifying”, said Nankali Maksud, a child violence specialist at UNICEF based in Nairobi, Kenya. “It is generations of trauma”.
She claimed that girls who had experienced sexual abuse were frequently unable to learn in their classes.
Globally, UNICEF estimates that sexual violence has affected some 370 million – or one in eight – girls and young women.
The number rises to 650 million, or one in five, when taking into account “non-contact” forms of sexual violence, such as online or verbal abuse, according to the agency’s report published on Wednesday.
The report said that while girls and women were worst affected, 240 to 310 million boys and men, or about one in 11, have experienced rape or sexual assault during childhood.
According to UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, “sexual violence against children is a stain on our moral conscience.”
“It inflicts deep and lasting trauma, often by someone the child knows and trusts, in places where they should feel safe”, she said.
Numbers were highest in “fragile settings”, including those with weak institutions, where UN peacekeeping forces are present or where there are large numbers of refugees.
“We are witnessing horrific sexual violence in conflict zones, where rape and gender-based violence are often used as weapons of war”, said Russell.
However, the data showed that sexual violence against children is pervasive, cutting across geographical, cultural, and economic boundaries.
Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of victims, with 79 million girls and women affected, followed by 75 million in Eastern and Southeastern Asia, 73 million in Central and Southern Asia, 68 million in Europe and Northern America, 45 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 29 million in Northern Africa and Western Asia, and 6 million in Oceania.
The release of such a figure is a first, calculated using national data and international survey programmes from 2010 to 2022, said Claudia Cappa, UNICEF chief statistician.
As soldiers continue their assault on the nearby Jabalia refugee camp, according to Al Jazeera’s Moath al-Kahlout, casualties have been arriving at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Staff claim Israeli forces have ordered them to leave as a result.
Rebecca Cheptegei raced across the finish line of the women’s marathon at the 2024 Summer Olympics on a sunburnt August day in Paris’s capital city.
The 33-year-old elite long-distance runner came only 44th in the race, but Uganda’s women’s marathon record holder was riding the high of her first Olympic Games, with years of races ahead of her.
However, just four weeks later, her ex-partner killed her at home in the rural Kinyoro, in the western Rift Valley region of Kenya.
East Africa was enraged by her horrific murder. For years, women have suffered physical and sexual abuse, including gruesome murders, from partners, spouses and other male family members in Kenya. Cheptegei’s death underscored how dangerous even elite athletes who had achieved success were.
However, according to female athletes and the organizations that support them, the success these women had made them more attractive to men who are still subject to more patriarchal gender stereotypes.
One in three women in Kenya reports at least a case of abuse by the age of 18, according to Kenyan charity, the Gender Violence Recovery Centre, largely from their intimate male partners, male family members, or other males known to them.
According to Femicide Count Kenya, a monitoring organization that monitors media-reported femicides, or the intentional murder of a woman by a man, there were at least 32 women murdered by male perpetrators in January alone, or about one woman every day.
The killings have continued throughout the year, according to Audrey Mugeni, co-founder of Femicide Count, despite hundreds of women calling for an end to violence against women in a massive demonstration in Nairobi in January.
“We had 154 cases by the end of last year … we are already at 174 now,” Mugeni said.
By the end of the year, she predicted that the femicide count for 2024 will have passed 200 cases at the current rate of killings.
In January 2024, people in Nairobi gathered to protest the rise in women’s violence there [Gerald Andersen/Anadolu Agency].
Elite athletes not spared
The athlete community in Kenya is active. Pro and amateur runners from the region or abroad train in the western Rift Valley because running at 8,000 feet (2,500 meters) above sea level helps athletes improve their stamina and ease competition at lower altitudes.
About three hours from Cheptegei’s village of Kinyoro, the rural town of Iten – with its rolling hills and dirt roads – is the Rift Valley’s running capital. Young people there, including girls, are early adopters, motivated by the success stories of local stars like Eliud Kipchoge and Mary Keitany. Many people are driven by their desire for fame and money to aid in their poverty.
However, because of their success as Olympians, world champions, and national stars, female athletes face high levels of emotional and physical violence from males jealous of their success or looking to control their earnings, female athletes say.
Cheptegei, who was born and raised in Bukwo, a town on the border between Kenya and Uganda, resided and trained there.
She recently achieved several milestones in her career as a professional runner, including placing second at the Florence Marathon in Italy in November 2023 and winning gold in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2022.
After finishing 44th at her Olympics race in Paris, Cheptegei returned to Kinyoro. According to neighbors who spoke with local journalists, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, her ex, jumped at her, threw fuel on her, and set her alight on Sunday, September 1.
By the time Cheptegei was rushed to a hospital in Eldoret county, doctors claimed she had burned more than 80% of her body. She died four days later after all her organs failed.
Marangach, who tried to infuse Cheptegei with even more gasoline while also suffering burns, passed away on September 9 in a hospital.
In an effort to be closer to the region’s training facilities, Cheptegei and her husband had fought over the small parcel of land where Cheptegei had built her home in Kinyoro. Cheptegei’s brother, Jacob, told the BBC that the two had lived together, but then had started to fall out over money in 2023, as Marangach started to question Cheptegei over what she did with her earnings.
The head of Uganda’s Olympic Committee, Donald Rukare, decried Cheptegei’s “vicious attack,” while the Paris Olympics organisers remarked that the “despicable crime reminds us of the alarming reality of violence that affects too many women in society.”
Rebecca Cheptegei competing in the 2023 Hungary women’s marathon final [Dylan Martinez/Reuters]
Tirop’s Angels
Since 2020, at least three more female runners have been murdered in Kenya. Long-distance runner Agnes Tirop’s death, which was reported in 2021, has had a long-lasting impact.
A small-statured athlete, Tirop once sported a closely cropped cut but was beginning to flaunt braids and flashy long nails on the track as she evolved from a junior athlete to a senior.
She broke the world record in the 10,000 km world women’s race, or 10k road race, in September 2021 in Germany.
She was fatally stabbed to death in her Iten home a month later, barely a month later. Police confirmed her husband and coach, Ibrahim Rotich, was the main suspect. Only 25 years old, Tirop.
The runner’s family has been following Rotich’s interactions with Tirop, who was 15 years his junior, for years. He first befriended and then started to date the young girl in her teen years. Her brother, an athlete named Martin Tirop, reported to The New Yorker magazine in 2022 that Tirop’s parents had tried to warn her against Rotich, but she later married him in secret. However, the athlete later revealed to her siblings that she intended to leave Rotich.
“I kind of blame myself, even though there were no signs, because Agnes always kept to herself,” Viola Lagat, Tirop’s friend, and fellow long-distance pro runner, told Al Jazeera. She once pointed out that Tirop had a wound, which she now believes was the result of Rotich’s negligence, but Lagat claims she never addressed her about it.
She doesn’t have any objections, she says. You wouldn’t know that she was going through anything. And that’s something that still amazes me: that she was being abused, breaking a world record in her life, she said.
Tirop’s Angels, a facility for women and girls who were abused, was established by Lagat and some of Tirop’s friends and relatives after her passing. Based in Iten, the organisation has catered to about 50 women survivors of abuse, offering them financial or emotional support. Women in the sport and beyond have a chance to participate in it. According to Lagat, many of the reports come from women who have experienced sexual abuse from close relatives, such as their fathers.
Dina Tirop, mother of murdered Kenyan distance runner Agnes Tirop, poses with Tirop’s portrait and a trophy at her home in Kapyemisa, in 2021 [Casmir Odour/AFP]
The same week as Tirop, national champion and 400-meter race champion Edith Mutoni, 27, was discovered with fatal stab wounds to her neck at her home in Kianjege village, closer to Nairobi. Her husband, Kennedy Chomba, was the main suspect. He was arrested and charged with murder, but it’s unclear if he is out on bail.
Damaris Mutua, a mother of one, a rising middle-distance athlete, was discovered strangled in an apartment close to Iten in April 2022. The Bahraini runner, who also competed for Bahrain, placed second at the time of the Arab Cross Country Championships that year. A manhunt is under way for her Ethiopian boyfriend and fellow runner Folie Hailemaryam Eskinder, who is believed by authorities to have fled to Ethiopia.
Because there are more male athletes and therefore more competition, female athletes are more prone to violence from male partners, according to Lagat, who claims that they wield money and influence, which they are unlikely to achieve. She claimed that older men in some circumstances try to exploit young girls by pretending to be her parents and promising to take her to international competitions after they spot a promising young girl and try to exploit her.
“That’s something that entices perpetrators who don’t want to work hard, for those men who are lazy. Men who only want to consume someone else’s sweat, Lagat said. I don’t understand why these men want to play sports with women but can’t compete with their success. ”
Many successful elite runners are from the Kalenjin ethnic group in the Rift Valley, according to Lorna Kimaiyo, a former student athlete who is currently studying the history of female athleticism at Columbia University.
Only Kalenjin men at first engaged in professional wrestling. However, after the 1984 Olympics featured the first women’s marathon, Kenya’s female runners started to dominate long-distance events – but they were not hailed at home by the men.
Women who sought to marry faced unloving husbands and frequent derision from the community. According to her, wives’ running was a source of conflict and frequently caused them to give up.
More female athletes going pro and earning more money from their wins is one of the reasons why violence against them has worsened, Kimaiyo said.
On their way to Agnes Tirop’s home in Iten, Kenya, who was found dead with stab wounds to her stomach in 2021, motorcycle riders pass under a town sign.
holding the perpetrators accountable
Ibrahim Rotich, Agnes Tirop’s husband and suspected murderer, has been out on bail since November 2023, after serving two years in jail. After concluding that Rotich’s life was in danger due to the widespread outcry that followed Tirop’s death, a judge said his release would allow the murder trial to begin.
Women’s rights activists point out Rotich’s release as one of the reasons why male violent against women are not dissuaded by Kenya’s laws, despite the state of his home county in Eldoret and his decision to travel to Iten, where Tirop was killed.
Under the country’s constitution, suspected murderers are allowed to be released on bail before trial. Some criticize this approach and point out that lengthy murder trials are possible. According to advocates, suspects should be detained and murder trials should be expedited.
“You will be living your life while somebody’s daughter has been buried,” said Tirop’s friend Lagat, adding that the legal system was not a strong enough deterrence.
In order to raise more awareness, women’s rights organizations are also pushing for the inclusion of femicide in Kenya’s constitution. Additionally, they want faster sentences for the offender. At present, women’s murders are treated as homicides, and guilty parties can attract a maximum life sentence.
According to activists, the Kenyan police are lax about violence committed against women by men, and many women’s murders go unsolved. Because of the lax laws, Mugeni of Femicide Count claims that she has only recently witnessed instances of femicide that successfully result in male perpetrators being imprisoned.
“Of more than 700 cases that we’ve looked at, there have been only three cases where the perpetrator was jailed that I remember,” Mugeni said, adding that in total, there are fewer than a handful.
According to Mugeni, “murder-suicide cases are becoming more and more prevalent,” with male defendants facing trial dying by suicide, obstructing the trial to end.
In police stations all over Kenya in 2004, gender desks were introduced, but many women expressed concerns about their lack of privacy because they frequently sit in open spaces, exposing abuse survivors as they recount their ordeal. Some say police officers also tend not to take women’s complaints seriously, instead encouraging couples to “resolve” their quarrels with dialogue.
Cheptegei reported her ex to the police twice this year before her gruesome death in September, according to her father, who reportedly told the Reuters news agency. Marangach was informed by officials that they should leave her alone, but he claimed that no other important things had been done.
While Kenya’s deeply patriarchal culture comes into play, some experts lay the blame for deaths squarely on the government and security officials, saying they do not react with urgency to women’s murders.
The Kenyan government has not been forthcoming with its response, Kimaiyo of Columbia University said, and the killers’ story simply vanishes after a few months.
In September of this year, Agnes Cheptei ponders the casket of her daughter Rebecca Cheptegei, who passed away after her ex-partner set her on fire in a burning house.
Building safe spaces
Lagat adds insult to Athletics Kenya, the governing body for runners, by athletes. She argued that women athletes should be taught to recognize signs of abuse in relationships in the same way that athletes are taught to avoid doping, which is using drugs to improve performance.
With the constant cases reported, the organisation ought to also have a safe space for female athletes to train, complete with the amenities they’d usually have access to, she said.
Athletics Kenya reached out to request a comment, but the network did not respond.
In Kenya, there are only a few government-run safe havens for female victims of domestic violence. There were some 54 operational shelters and rescue centres in 18 out of Kenya’s 47 counties, with only two managed by the government, according to the United Nations.
Lagat claims to be working diligently to get Tirop’s Angels to purchase some land so they can create a permanent safe house in Kenya. She claimed that this would help Tirop’s Angels reach more women who are in need of assistance, particularly young girls.
“Many of the cases that really stick with us are defilement cases,” Lagat said, referring to cases where fathers sexually abuse their daughters. We don’t know if mothers are being manipulated or if they are afraid of themselves, which is the cause of the affects.
According to Lagat, a teenage girl who was abused by her father ended up getting pregnant and contracting HIV from him. Although it took a while to get her spirits up and although her perpetrator walked free, the girl is now successfully managing the condition – four years later.
She graduated from primary school, and is now a high school student, Lagat said with a smile on her face. “She is running, she is doing amazing now and that’s something we are really proud of,” she said.
Despite Kenya’s data from Femicide Count suggesting that this may not necessarily be because there has been a rise in female murder, but rather because more people are aware of what constitutes femicide, Mugeni, the monitoring group’s representative, suggested that this may be because more people are aware of what counts as femicide.
Many people did not understand what femicide was when we began counting six years ago, so I had to train Google Alert, Mugeni said. “I told it: tell me when a woman has been hacked, tell me when a woman is strangled, and so on. However, there is now much more awareness of what it is, leading to more cases. ”
More media are also reporting the deaths of murdered women, not as isolated cases, but as part of a systematic problem, she said.
Mugeni said she still feels fear after going through the cases. I constantly wonder, “Am I going to be the next?” ”
She claimed that she is now constantly on the lookout for her female friends and other women around her so she doesn’t want to miss any signs as she goes about her own training and work.
When her team engages in conversation with young female runners, she yells their rights into their ears.
“You should be respected, nobody should be hitting you,” Lagat tells them. You have your money, according to the statement, “You are the one who makes the decisions regarding what you want to do with the money you have earned through your career.” He ought to be wealthy. ”
Egypt has denied Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s accusations, but the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) claims that Egypt is involved in airstrikes against the paramilitary group.
Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, claimed that Egypt was using United States bombs in its strikes targeting his forces near Jebel Moya, a key area south of the capital, Khartoum.
In a video released online on Wednesday, he claimed, “If the Americans were not in agreement, these bombs wouldn’t reach Sudan.”
“Egypt is fighting us”, he said, accusing it of being one of six countries of interfering in the conflict, including Iran.
According to UN data, more than 10 million people have been forced to flee Sudan while more than 2 million have, according to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) recently gained a foothold in the conflict that erupted in April 2023, when long-running tensions between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Dagalo broke out.
Dagalo claimed that Egypt provided SAF and al-Burhan with drone training.
The Egyptian government’s ministry of foreign affairs refuted the claims that its air force was involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan.
Egypt denies those accusations, but it calls on the international community to gather the supporting evidence, the ministry said in a statement.
Egypt has participated in mediating the conflict alongside Saudi Arabia and the US. Earlier this year, it also hosted discussions between rival political parties.
The SAF recently advanced in Khartoum and the southeast of Sennar state, suggesting that the RSF chief’s alleged airstrikes against his troops would force them to retreat from the strategically important Jebel Moya region.
Dagalo also claimed Tigrayan, Eritrean, Azerbaijani and Ukrainian mercenaries were present in the country.
The RSF, which has also been accused of crimes against humanity and sexual violence, is largely to blame for the violence that has occurred in Sudan during the war.
However, rights groups claim that the SAF targeted civilians as well, bombed residential areas, and stopped aid. The army resisted attending talks in Switzerland to end the war in August.
“This war will not end in one or two, three, four years. Some people mention one million soldiers, but Dagalo predicted that by the year one million will be available.
The United Arab Emirates has also been accused of meddling in the conflict. Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, accused the UAE in June of arming the RSF.
In January, a UN report compiled for the UN Security Council , said it had “credible” evidence , that the UAE had sent weapons to the RSF “several times per week” via Amdjarass in northern Chad. The UAE denied the accusation.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), global wildlife populations have decreased by more than 70% over the past 50 years.
The conservation charity published a stocktake on Thursday, assessing more than 5, 000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, warning that habitats like the Amazon rainforest were reaching “tipping points”, with potentially “catastrophic consequences” for “most species”.
The Living Planet Report found the 35, 000 populations under review had fallen 73 percent since 1970, mostly due to human pressures. Terrestrial and marine vertebrates have recorded the slowest declines in freshwater species, followed by terrestrial and marine ones.
According to the report’s snapshots, pink river and tucuxi dolphin populations in the Brazilian state of Amazonas have decreased by 65 percent and 57 percent, respectively, as a result of hunting, with climate change also threatening their survival.
In Gabon, the number of forest elephants had declined by 78 to 81 percent, with WWF researchers finding “strong evidence” of poaching for the ivory trade. With almost half the continent’s forest elephants in Gabon, the decline was considered a “considerable setback” for the future of the species.
Elephants graze in the Loango National Park in Gabon, where wildlife has been battered by wars, habitat destruction and hunting]File: Steeve Jordan/AFP]
The report found that habitat loss and degradation, driven primarily by food systems, is the biggest threat to wildlife populations around the world, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease.
“This is not just about wildlife, it’s about the essential ecosystems that sustain human life”, said Daudi Sumba, chief conservation officer at WWF.
“The changes could be irreversible, with devastating consequences for humanity”, he said, using the example of deforestation in the Amazon, which could “shift this critical ecosystem from a carbon sink to a carbon source”.
Other threats include climate change, in particular in Latin America and the Caribbean, and pollution, notably in North America, Asia and the Pacific.
“The good news is that we’re not yet past the point of no return”, said Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International.
She cited international initiatives, including a groundbreaking pact signed at the most recent UN meeting on biodiversity in 2022 to protect 30 percent of the planet from environmental degradation, degradation, and climate change by 2030.
But she warned, “All of these agreements have checkpoints in 2030 that are in danger of being missed”.
According to the report, some populations have stabilized or even grown as a result of conservation efforts and species reintroductions.
