Women are abusing Sexual Offenses Act

Busia Woman Representative Florence Mutua has tabled a Bill to introduce new offences in the Sexual Offences Act.

The Bill proposes a Sh500,000 fine or a five-year jail term or both for parents who negotiate with defilers.

Intentional body contact involving genitals, buttocks and breasts of people of the opposite sex will be a sexual offence. The Bill also proposes setting up of special units in police stations in all the 47 counties to deal with sexual offences. This Bill is the brainchild of feminist groups who draft gender bills and give them to a woman MP to table in Parliament. It is wrong for elite women to preoccupy themselves with making laws targeting men, and inciting fellow women against men. Is there a crisis of sexual crimes in the country?

A visit by National Assembly Committee on Administration and National Security to prisons, recently, found out that more than 50 per cent of inmates were jailed on sexual offences. There is indeed something seriously wrong with a law that congests jails at a high rate, which needs to be addressed, not to add new offences.

The Sexual Offences Act has been accompanied with a lot of activism, making it difficult for suspects to be accorded a fair trial. In the Act, the burden of proof was shifted to the defendant. Activists argued that the victim would be too traumatised to testify in court.

Women have been using the Act as a tool of waging a psychological warfare. Endless claims of sexual crimes and ever rising calls for offenders to be castrated are all psychological warfare on men. They are an attack on males’ character and affect the boy child psychologically.