Empowerment training prevents rape of Kenyan girls

Adolescent girls in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, are frequent targets of sexual harassment and assault: Nearly one in five of them is raped each year. When these crimes are perpetrated against Nairobi’s teen girls, they’re often expected to react with shame and silence.

But a small non-governmental organization, No Means No Worldwide, has a strategy to change that. The co-founders, Jake Sinclair, MD, and Lee Paiva, an American husband-and-wife team, developed a curriculum of empowerment training to teach girls that it’s OK to say “no” to unwanted sexual advances. The training also gives girls specific verbal and physical skills to defend themselves, as well as information about where to go for help after a rape or other sexual assault.

The results are impressive. Stanford researchers who work with Sinclair and Paiva report today in Pediatrics that the empowerment training cut annual rates of rape by more than a third. Among the group of 1,978 girls trained during the study, more than half used their new knowledge to fend off attempted rape, and 65 percent stopped instances of harassment, halting hundreds of incidents.

From our press release about the research:

“Clearly, girls should never be placed in these situations in the first place,” said Clea Sarnquist, DrPH, the study’s lead author and a senior research scholar in pediatrics at Stanford. Changing males’ attitudes and behavior about assault is an important area for the team’s current and future work, she said. “But with such a high prevalence of rape, these girls need something to protect them now. By giving them the tools to speak up and the knowledge that ‘I have domain over my own body,’ we’re giving them the opportunity to protect themselves.”

The video above, one of a series of testimonials that No Means No Worldwide has collected from Nairobi girls, shows the power of that sense of domain over one’s body. In the video, a schoolgirl named Catherine tells how she stopped a male student from harassing her. When the video begins, it’s impossible not to notice how young and vulnerable she seems. But then she recounts how, when this boy followed her and demanded sex, she remembered her self-defense classes.

“I stood and maintained eye contact,” she says in the video. “I warned him that day and told him he should never in his life dare follow me.”

As she says the words, her demeanor transforms: She draws herself up straight, looks directly in the camera, and raises her index finger in a gesture of commanding attention.

Maryanne Wangui, a young Kenyan woman who recorded many of the testimonials, said something to me that resonates with Catherine’s account and sticks in my mind: “If you give girls the right skills, they know what to do. It doesn’t matter the age of the girl or the size of the girl; they’re all powerful inside.”