Task force blames parents and police officers for bungled defilement cases

A report prepared by a multi-agency team set up to look into the children’s justice system shows that most parents do not cooperate during prosecution of suspects.

Instead, they prefer out of court settlements with the offenders.

Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga formed a 17-member task force led by Court of Appeal judge Martha Koome to review, among other things, the law on children and identify challenges and make recommendations.

The task force handed the report to Chief Justice David Maraga. It sheds light on how minors are denied justice while offenders go scot-free.

Analysis of police records reveal that the bulk of pending cases in Kenyan courts relating to children matters between 2016 and 2018 are sexual offenses.

Sexual offenses accounted for 69.48 per cent of all pending cases involving children in the eight counties sampled, with the highest being in Nairobi at 90.03 per cent, followed by Nyandarua at 79.33 per cent.

According to the report, witnesses do not show up despite being summoned. The report also apportions blame on the police for poor investigations.

Many cases are lost because the police hardly visit the scene of the crime to carry out in-depth investigations by interviewing witnesses, and carrying out forensic tests on items recovered.

Disconnet

“The breach in the chain-link is reflected in disconnect between the police investigators and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP). Police investigators often rely on witness and victim accounts, rarely visiting the scenes of crime. This means that there were no recoveries of physical evidence or exhibits for matters before the court,” the status report on children in justice system in Kenya reads in part.

Kilifi County leads in cases withdrawn by victims. 

Coincidentally, the county stands out on the age profile of the alleged perpetrators.

Data gathered between 2016 and this year reveals that almost two-thirds are boys (21.7 per cent) and adults aged between 18 and 25 (41.5 per cent).

It is followed by Bungoma while Nyandarua and Kisumu tie in cases that have been withdrawn followed by Nairobi.

No parent in Makueni had withdrawn defilement cases. Narok and Garissa have a similar tally of few cases withdrawn.

At the same time, the report revealed that children wait for two to three years before their cases are determined.

Data from the Judiciary reveals that pending cases date as far back as 2014, denying justice to child victims as well as children who are accused.

Justice tends to be delayed, particularly in sexual offense cases. In one case, a victim moved to court when she was child but the matter was concluded when was already an adult.

“Quite a number of documents presented in courts from the police were tampered with. We also noticed a number of surprises in courts, where the DPP prosecutors had not studied their files before the court only to realise that some of the documents needed in prosecuting were either missing, plucked or altered. Police files were in most of the prioritized cases not presented in court, and lacked evidence in the DPP file that the police summoned witnesses to court in many of the cases,” the report says.

Boys from one rehabilitation school shared harrowing stories of being subjected to physical and psychological abuse by the police officers, adults who they were locked up with and staff in the institutions.

They were beaten and locked up in a small dark room in the library for an entire day or several days.

Some of the boys complained of being prevented by staff from talking to their parents. The children’s stories echoed the findings of a baseline survey on violence against children in the Kenyan justice system.

A survey by the taskforce indicates that violence is a component of children’s lives across all stages of the justice system, with 79.8 per cent of the respondents, reporting having witnessed violence perpetrated on other children and 72.2 per cent having been subjected to violence.