Defiant: LANDSCAPE SURVEY ON VIOLENCE AGAINST LBQ WOMEN, TRANS PEOPLE & FEMALE SEX WORKERS IN BURUNDI, KENYA, TANZANIA & UGANDA
“Sexuality and gender go hand in hand; both are creatures of culture and society, and both play a central, crucial role in maintaining power relations in our societies. They give each other shape and any enquiry into the former tends to invoke the latter.” — Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader
This study examines lived experiences of gender-based violence as faced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women, transgender people, and female sex workers in Burundi, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The study examines how state efforts to exercise control over women’s bodies, combined with patriarchal social systems, result in a wide array of types of violence. As Ugandan feminist lawyer Sylvia Tamale goes on to say in her introduction to the anthology African Sexualities, such systems of control have origins in British colonialism, at which time “A new script, steeped in the Victorian moralistic, antisexual and body-shame edicts, was inscribed on the bodies of African women and with it an elaborate system of control. The instrumentalization of sexuality through the nib of statutory, customary and religious law is closely related to women’s oppression and gender constructions.” Postindependence governments discovered that sexuality could be instrumentalized to suit their needs, too. Over 50 years since colonial power was vanquished on much of the African continent, patriarchal power over women’s bodies and sexualities persists.
In several spheres encountered during this study, “gender-based violence” appears to be used interchangeably with “violence against women.” In much of the world, including in East Africa, violence against women was long negated. Only in the past few decades have women began to claim space to speak out about violence – domestic violence, sexual violence, and even broader cultural phenomena such as female genital mutilation (FGM). In our view, while it is important to centre women’s experiences in discussions of gender based violence, patriarchy as a system of social
control also can involve subjecting other bodies to violence, including the bodies of men and gender nonconforming people. For the purpose of this report, the definition of gender-based violence includes violence perpetrated against people with non-conforming gender identities, including both transgender men and transgender women, as well as cisgender women. In examining violence that targets women and trans people with the aim of controlling their sexuality or gender expression, the study focuses primarily at what might be considered “gender nonconformity-based violence.”
A classic dictionary definition of violence is “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.” The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993) describes “violence against women” more broadly, as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.” The declaration sets forth an understanding of gender-based violence that encompasses, but is not limited to, physical, sexual and psychological violence, occurring in the family, the general community, or at the hands of the state.
In conducting this research, we sought respondents’ own definitions and examples of violence as they experienced it in recognition of the importance of nuancing this discourse based on the lived contextual realities. Their responses were wide-ranging and did not always include acts that might constitute violence under strict legal definitions. Because the purpose of this report is to convey the realities of LBQ women, trans people, and female sex workers in East Africa, we adopt their uses of the term “violence.” Our use of this term, in a broad sense, is not necessarily an endorsement of prosecution of all such acts as violence under the law. Where relevant, we also lean on definitions provided by international institutions.