President of the Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, took the bold step declare a national emergency with rape and sexual violence in 2019. Five years later, BBC Africa Eye investigates whether the survivors of the attack have received justice.
Warning: This article contains details that may be disturbing to some readers.
In the city of Makeni, three hours by car east of the capital of the Sierra Leone, Freetown, a young mother sits outside her house with her three-year-old daughter.
Anita (not her real name) describes the day in June 2023 when she found her baby girl with blood dripping from the diaper.
“I was working for a woman and that Saturday morning she asked me to go to the market,” he says, explaining that later She left her daughter with her employer and her 22-year-old son.
“He took my daughter. He said he wanted to buy her candy and cookies. It was a lie”.
When he returned from the market, he realized that the girl was missing. After finding her, she found ii, but the 22-year-old mother saw that the little girl was bleeding.
He took her to the hospital. Two rounds of stitches were done and it was confirmed that she had been raped.
“The nurses started watching the girl and they said, ‘Oh my God, what did this man do to this girl?’ The doctor who treated my daughter called. “
Anita went to the police, but the man fled and a year later the police have not been able to find him.
“The president created a law so that anyone who rapes children can be arrested and sent to prison. She says angry because nothing seems to have been done.
It refers to a tougher law on sex crimes that was created five years ago, after President Maada Bio declared a rape emergency.
“Take away our girls”
The move followed protests in December 2018, when hundreds of people dressed in white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Keep Your Hands Off Our Daughters” marched through Freetown.
The news about another child being raped shocked the country: a five-year-old girl who was paralyzed from the waist down.
It was then reported that cases of sexual violence had almost doubled in a year and that a third affected children. The Sierra Leoneans were already tired.
The four-month state of emergency that began in February 2019 allowed the president to divert state resources to address sexual violence.
The updated Sexual Offenses Act introduced tougher penalties for sexual assaults.
Penalties for rape were increased to a minimum of 15 years, or life imprisonment if it was a child.
The following year, a Model Court for Sex Offenses was established in Freetown to speed up trials.
There appears to have been some progress: reported cases of sexual and gender-based violence have fallen by almost 17%, from just over 12,000 in 2018 to just over 10,000 in 2023, which according to police statistics.
Creating more awareness and new structures is one thing, But making sure people like Anita’s daughter get justice is another matter..
The Rainbow Campaign is a national charity that works with survivors of sexual violence. It says only 5% of the 2,705 cases it handled reached the High Court in 2022.
One of the problems is the resources available to those who are supposed to enforce the law.
At the Makeni police station where Anita reported her daughter’s rape, Assistant Superintendent Abu Bakarr Kanu, who heads the Family Support Unit (FSU), says they receive about four cases of sexually assaulting children each week.
The major challenge facing his team is the lack of transport to physically go and arrest the suspects.
He coordinates the seven police departments in the region and none of them have a single vehicle.
“There are times when it is easy to get to the suspect, but due to the lack of vehicles it is not possible to go after him to arrest him,” Deputy Superintendent Kanu said.
“It’s a challenge to do the right thing at the right time.”
Like many in Sierra Leone, he was delighted with the government’s action following the state of emergency.
“We have enough…good laws and policies, but the structure and staffing is a challenge for us to comprehensively address the issues of sexual and gender-based violence in Sierra Leone.”
Even if an accused is caught, it is an even greater struggle to bring him before a judge.
To try the case against a rape suspect, there is only one person in the country who can sign the documents: the Attorney General.
The goal he wanted to speed up the process and bring cases directly to court, but another hurdle was created.
“No judicial officer or lawyer can currently sign a lawsuit for sexual crimes,” said Attorney General Joseph AK Sesay, a government-appointed lawyer.
“The 2019 amendment states that only the Attorney General can sign a lawsuit. So that has been a challenge in bringing the charges to court.”
Information Minister Chernor Bah admits that this is not a perfect process, but he says It is “a process that we will continue to improve.”
Answering the question that many believe that not much has changed when it comes to getting justice for rape survivors, she admitted that “in some communities there are people who ‘ feel like that.”
But he rejects the idea that there has been no progress. “I think the systemic reforms we implemented are there. There are new laws. And I think these measures have achieved a general feeling that we are no longer in the dark days of 2019.”
For Anita, in Makeni, it has been almost a year since her young daughter was raped. He has not received any new information from the police, so he started publishing the suspect’s picture Facebook.
“I want people to help me look for the young man. I am tortured and not happy. “I don’t want what happened to my daughter to happen to any other child.”
