Nine in ten women suffer but only two in ten take action
It is a lot harder to get a Lady’s phone number in Kenya than in
Brazil, Egypt, India and Colombia, but that has not completely
insulated Kenyan women from...
receiving surprise unwelcome calls and messages from strangers, reveals a study released yesterday by Truecaller, a company that helps phone users identify callers and detect spam.
receiving surprise unwelcome calls and messages from strangers, reveals a study released yesterday by Truecaller, a company that helps phone users identify callers and detect spam.
About two-thirds of Kenyan women avoid sharing
their phone number with other people, compared with Brazil’s three
percent, Egypt (28 percent), India (36 percent) and Colombia (44
percent). But despite the caution, nine out of 10 still receive
harassment and nuisance calls. One in five also regularly receives
sexually inappropriate calls or messages, a rate just as high as India’s
but dwarfed by Egypt’s one in three.
“Even after having many such experiences, it is such a nasty thing one cannot get used to, but there is little I can do” says Ms Esther Gacau, a 30-year-old businesswoman living in Nairobi.
But
even more worrying is that despite women reporting that such calls and
messages are offensive, only one in 10 women (11 percent) in Kenya
considers them as constituting harassment, compared with India (58
percent), Egypt (35 percent), Colombia (17 percent) and Egypt (eight
percent).
The study, Insights: The Impact of Harassment
Calls & SMS for Women in India, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt &
Kenya, established that the vice is more prevalent in Nairobi, Mombasa,
Kiambu and Nakuru.
Sexual harassment is the leading safety and security concern for
girls and women worldwide, according to Girls’ Safety in Cities Across
the World, a survey conducted by Plan International in 2018, in which 94
percent of the respondents said the risk of sexual harassment in
Nairobi was either high or extremely high.
The survey
defined sexual harassment as hassling, eve-teasing, stalking, touching,
flashing and staring at girls and young women.
Such harassment has grown tremendously with the proliferation of
the mobile phone, a garget that has become part of life, useful not
only in communication but also in financial transactions, especially in
Kenya, the home of M-Pesa. About 10.4 million females over the age of 30
own a phone, translating to 47 percent of that population, according to
the 2019 census.
But why give out one’s number to a stranger at all in the first place anyway?
The
study lists several circumstances under which Kenyan women give out
their phone numbers, all of them hardly avoidable – half while shopping
or filling in a visitors’ logbook, 17 percent while entering a contest,
15 percent during hotel or restaurant reservation, 15 percent when
recharging their mobile phone and four percent while accepting a
delivery.
What many women do not understand is how this
information, given out in such formal transactions, ends up in the
hands of random men who keep calling and reaching out to them with
unwelcome messages.
A majority (53 percent) of the
women that were called or sent messages by strangers reported being
angered, 42 percent were offended, 30 percent irritated, 27 percent
troubled and 26 percent felt fear, according to the study.
“It
is a crazy world out there,” says Ms Esther Gacau, a 30-year-old
businesswoman living in Nairobi who has had several run-ins with
stalkers.
Recently, she was selling human hair online
when a man posing as a prospective customer interested in buying it for
his girlfriend started communicating with her on Facebook. His inquiries
were intermittent so she proposed that they link up via phone and
conclude the transaction. It is that decision that saw a seemingly
lucrative business opportunity turn into torment. “As soon as I called
him, he told me that he had seen and liked my profile and really wanted
to meet me,” she told Newsplex. Her pleas to have their
engagement stick to business bore little fruit. She knew she was dealing
with an extreme case of perversion when the man started bombarding her
with explicit and inappropriate messages. Her patience soon ran out with
the first arrival of nude photos via WhatsApp. She blocked his line.
Normalising sexual harassment?
Only
one in five women take action against offence, while at least three in
five in the other four countries do so. Some 49 percent block the
number, 40 percent ignore the calls or SMSes, 32 percent call their
operator for help and 29 percent told harasser to stop. A measly six
percent reported to the authorities, low engagement of the police being
common in all the five countries.
“Even after having
many such experiences, it is such a nasty thing one cannot get used to,
but there is little I can do” says Esther.
The study
notes that for Kenyan women, with little support from authorities and
local attitudes, harassment often has to be severe before women speak
out.
Over half (53 percent) of the sexual or
inappropriate calls come from within the cold and mean walls of Kenyan
prisons, far ahead of Brazil’s 27 percent, the other of the two
countries where inmates are notorious for stalking women via phone.
This
only adds yet another stripe to the reputation of Kenya’s correctional
facilities, already famed for harbouring criminals who spend their jail
term swindling hard-working citizens of their wealth.
The survey was conducted with the support of Ipsos between November 22, 2019 and February 24, 2020.
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