Sexual abuse: Burying heads in sand makes us complicit

Last Friday, I read with a mix of disappointment and quiet anger that the committee that the Ministry of Justice had set up to investigate the sexual harassment case lodged by Senior State Attorney, Samantha Mwesigye, had cleared the accused of all charges on grounds that they found no evidence.

This is not entirely surprising because world over, the trend has been that powerful people, mostly men, get away with sexual misconduct against women and girls. It is also in keeping with our judicial system, which was designed to appear to be dispensing justice, all the while protecting the powerful.

So while the sexual harassment committee may have sat and deliberated, truth and justice was never their mission. But that could be a discussion for another day.

Today I want to call us to heel to discuss our silence and hypocrisy on sexual harassment. We all know it is happening. We have seen it at school, at work, at church and on the streets. And yet when Samantha spoke up, we looked away in shame and wondered why she would speak publicly about the issues that the rest of us have learnt to deal with. Some said she brought it upon herself. And yet our experiences (both as abusers ad victims) tell us otherwise.

We all have a story about the creepy teacher from our childhood. My primary school had one. All the children avoided him because he scratched the middle of their palms suggestively whenever they shook hands, or teased them about the holes in their uniform by poking his fingers through them. One day he told an 11-year-old child in my class, “It is good your breasts are growing.” The girl reported him to the Senior Woman teacher. He denied the charges as was expected.

I remember that he corralled us into a room to protest his guilt. He said if he had done what he had been accused of, lightning should strike him dead. I prayed for lightning in that moment, but it never came. Even the universe refused to serve us its version of justice.

We all have or know of stories like this. Generations of children abused by their teachers. We were sexually harassed as schoolgirls in “decent” uniforms in all girls Catholic schools. We understood that it had nothing to do with what we wore or how we spoke to the teacher.

Knowing these truths about our childhood, what has changed now that makes us discredit Samantha’s story? Is it really such a stretch of the imagination for similar dynamics to play out in the workplace? Would we rather blame the victim because that version of the truth is much easier to handle than to acknowledge that we too are contributors to the system that allows sexual harassment to fester?

A couple of years ago, there was a massive billboard that warned against cross-generational sex. I remember that it had this huge man, a sugar daddy type; heavyset and pot-bellied. An accompanying message sprawled across the billboard. “Would you let this man date your daughter? Then what are you doing with his?”

I recoil even now at the idea of that man with someone else’s school age child. It drummed home the message that if you did not want something vile done to someone you cared about, why would you do it to someone’s someone? While you are sexually harassing someone’s daughter, someone is doing the same to yours.

You probably think her good education, her assertiveness and her money will protect her. But this is a system that you are enabling and she is caught up in it too. I know that making this argument can sometimes appear reductive. People should be valued because they are people, period. Not because they are of value to someone.

Ms Eryenyu is the research advocacy and movement building manager at Akina Mama wa Afrika. [email protected]