Enhancing Access to Justice for Survivors of Sexual Violence in Low-Resource Environments
Gender inequality continues to be one of the world’s most enduring violations of human rights, and sexual violence is one of the most damaging manifestations of gender inequality with devastating impacts on individuals, families, and communities. In low-resource environments, one of the key limitations to addressing sexual violence is the lack of access to valuable forensic evidence that can assist investigations and prosecutions of perpetrators. In the absence of effective investigations and prosecutions, confidence in the criminal justice process is very low which enables the cycle of violence to continue with impunity. Over the past 4 years, researchers at the University of Leicester have been working with partners in Kenya to pilot DNA evidence collection kits which have been designed to overcome specific challenges to collecting, preserving, and analyzing evidence in cases of sexual violence in Kenya. This project highlights the importance of innovating standard practice to meet the challenges of certain environments, and the benefits of a sustainable partnership approach to tackling complex global justice issues.
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>> Hello, my name is Lisa Smith.
I'm a professor of criminology and the head of School of Criminology
at the University of Leicester in the UK.
And I'm very excited to be here participating in the HIDS event online.
So today I'd like to tell you all about a project that's been going on in
partnership
with the University of Leicester and the Wang Gookanja Foundation in Kenya,
where we're working on implementing DNA innovation to help survivors
of sexual violence access justice.
This project began about five years ago when I met an amazing woman called Wang
Gookanja
at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya.
Wang Gookanja Foundation, which kind of has like a holistic approach to access
to justice for survivors of sexual violence.
And Wang Gookanja sat down to talk about the issues of gathering DNA evidence
after cases of sexual violence as an aid to help with the prosecution of
perpetrators
and helping survivors access justice.
And what I learned from those early conversations with Wang Gookanja is
that they were really struggling in Kenya to properly embed DNA evidence
in investigations for sexual violence.
So the project started from that point trying to help use DNA evidence
to achieve access to justice for survivors.
In Kenya.
I think one of the really interesting aspects of this project has been the
interdisciplinary
and inter-sectoral collaborations that we've built over the last five years or
so.
We have myself as a criminologist interested in how DNA evidence can transform
the criminal
justice process through building confidence for survivors, for the courts, for
the police.
We have genetics experts at the University of Leicester who were interested
in the kind of forensic genetics innovations that we needed to bring justice
through DNA evidence to the Kenyan context.
But also organizations like the Wang Gookanja Foundation which are NGOs
who are championing gender equality across the board,
but specifically helping survivors access justice after their ideals.
And I think the passion for the project really comes primarily from Wang Gookan
ja herself.
She started the Wang Gookanja Foundation after having a very difficult time
in the criminal justice system herself as a survivor of sexual violence.
But she's channeled that energy into really championing positive change in
Kenya.
So she really brings a lot of personal passion to the project
and then the kind of academics bring the research passion alongside of that.
I think it's fair to say that across the world,
regardless of how high or low resource an environment might be,
our ability to successfully investigate sexual violence and prosecute it is
very challenging.
So it's notoriously a very difficult crime for the courts to handle,
for the police to investigate.
But when you start working in a low resource context like Kenya, for example,
or a humanitarian crisis, a displaced community, that sort of thing,
the challenges really ramp up.
And one of the things we learned when we first started working in Kenya
is that we had wrongly thought that maybe they weren't trying to collect DNA
evidence already
in the Kenyan context.
But actually what we found is there was some really good work already going on
in a real will to embed DNA in the process.
What the challenge was was that the police were not confident with the DNA
that was being collected by medical clinics.
And the reason for that is it wasn't being stored properly.
It was not being stored in tamper evident packaging, for example.
So there was a lot of risk of contamination and human error leading to,
you know, evidence not being of high integrity.
So the police had very low confidence in the evidence.
So they weren't using it.
And what was happening is then we were seeing it was not getting to the courts.
Prosecution rates were very, very low.
So interestingly, some of the exact same problems you see in a high resource
context,
but sort of amplified by a lack of training and a lack of capacity building in
Kenya itself.
One of the really important factors that we have embedded in this project
right from the beginning through working primarily with Wengie,
it was to keep survivors' voices in the conversations
around the design of new DNA technology.
So when we began looking at DNA evidence kits, for example,
and what was already in use in Kenya and what's in use in other contexts,
we really tapped into the survivors of sexual violence network in Kenya,
which Wengie's Foundation convenes.
And this is a group of really amazing women and men
who have experienced sexual violence firsthand,
who are really keen to see positive change in their communities.
So speaking to those survivors about their experience of visiting a clinic
and having medical examination done and quite intimate swabs done
in hopes of recovering DNA was really, really crucial for helping us design a
kit
that was really, really simple, obviously very cost effective,
because if you want to implement something like a DNA kit,
when there's low resource, you need to be as cost effective as possible,
something that minimizes waste as much as possible,
you know, in our current kind of climate crisis.
And we don't want to be contributing lots of unnecessary plastic waste, for
example.
So the key was really something very simple,
but something that survivors themselves could understand why it was being used
and understand the importance of reporting their case quickly.
And so embedding the voices of that survivors network
has been really, really key since day one.
We started off, as I say, talking to survivors and talking to the police
and the judiciary in Kenya to get a sense of, you know,
what was really required to overcome some of the challenges that they were
experiencing.
And what we came up with in the early days of the project
was a very simple module of a sexual assault kit.
So just the vaginal swab module of the sexual assault kit.
And what we were aiming to do is provide the Kenyan clinics
with better packaging primarily, because what we learned from spending time in
Kenya
was that by not packaging swabs properly, they were degrading,
they were at risk of contamination and human error and tampering.
So one of the key things we introduced, which was really simple actually,
was just a tube that the swabs used swabs could go in,
where the swab could dry within the tube,
and then temper evident packaging as well,
that the whole tube with the swab could go in,
where it could maintain integrity while being stored at the clinic
until it was collected by the police.
And what we've seen is an increase in confidence by the police,
for example, that that evidence will have better integrity
than the previous practice, which was drawing swabs in an open cabinet
all next to each other, packaging them in Manila envelopes essentially.
So the packaging was really, really key to the early model of the kit
and is something that they're now using in the clinics
that we've been working with in Kenya.
Over the course of the 18 months of the funded project that we just completed,
we managed to have about nine gender violence recovery centers in Nairobi,
which are medical clinics where survivors can report sexual violence.
So about nine of those clinics have been stocked with the DNA kits,
so they're using them with live cases and sort of reporting back
to us, giving us feedback on the design of the kits.
The clinicians have been very positive about how easy the kits are to use.
And so those kits are in use now.
What we're hoping to do longer term, of course,
is follow those kits through the criminal justice process,
which obviously takes a lot of time, even in the best of situations.
These kind of cases are very, very slow to move through the system.
But what we're hoping to see is those kits start to be collected by the police,
showing up at the government chemist, which is the forensic lab in Kenya,
being processed and then starting to see them emerging in prosecutions
and hopefully having a positive impact on prosecuting offenders.
So that's kind of the medium to long term plans for the current project.
I think what I'd love to see the project grow into
is to kind of be able to scale up, I think, to even more complex situations.
So I would love to see a situation where you have, for example,
a humanitarian emergency and you have a medical response to that emergency.
And these kits or something like them just becoming a standard issue
thing that a set up medical clinic in a crisis could be offering to survivors
of sexual violence because we know, unfortunately, in cases of natural
disasters or crisis or conflict situations, cases of sexual violence
tend to increase astronomically.
And so being able to respond to those in a timely fashion
and capture some DNA evidence while you can, I think, could be really valuable
to criminal justice processes down the line.
So I'd love to see these kind of kits rolling out on a larger scale globally
and just being made part of the routine humanitarian efforts around the world.
During the course of the project, we've learned some really valuable lessons
along the way that we would certainly take into, you know, other contexts
that we're hoping to be working within.
I think the two that stand out to me, one is that, you know, you have these
certain assumptions about a situation before you start to work in it
and before you become kind of intimately knowledgeable about what's going on.
One of the assumptions we had was that, you know, you could take the sort of
kit
that's used in a high resource environment and simply implement it in a
low resource environment if you have enough money.
And essentially, we very quickly learned that that is not the case.
You really do have to work with the local context, the local culture,
the local grassroots organizations who can really help you to understand
the really specific needs of a particular, you know, criminal justice
ecosystem and a particular cultural context, essentially.
So I think, you know, we are starting to have conversations with other nations
about the possibility of implementing similar innovations in their context.
But I think we're going to be, you know, almost starting from scratch in each
one of those contexts to really understand what the challenges are
and how we might be able to adapt what we've piloted in Kenya to suit their
needs.
I think the second lesson that we learned quite early on, and I think this is
going
to be true in any context as well, is the assumption that every survivor of
sexual violence wants criminal justice following their ordeal.
And I think one of the other things that, you know, has become really, really
important is that, yes, some survivors do want to report their crime in order
to pursue criminal justice, but justice looks quite different for different
survivors of sexual violence.
And I think any project that's working in different cultural contexts needs to
be,
you know, really sensitive to that and not assuming that every survivor wants
to go
through the criminal justice process, but for the ones who do, trying to design
forensic innovations that suit their needs and help them access justice is key
for us, really.
One of the things that really helped the project succeed along the way, of
course,
is the interdisciplinary team that was working on it.
None of these sorts of projects would happen with just sort of one person or
one
area of expertise working on them.
So as well as working alongside Wen Gekenga, who sort of represents the
survivor
voice in Kenya and the community of activists in Kenya who are working on
gender justice issues.
The team really consisted of a very interdisciplinary academic team as well.
So what I brought to the project was criminology expertise.
So my interest mainly being the role that the science can play in the criminal
justice process, how important it is to get the needs of survivors into the
conversation and trying to design something that was as simple as possible.
And that could fit in the specific context that we were working in.
But what I needed was a team of forensic geneticists as well who could bring
the
science into the discussion.
And I was really, really fortunate to work with two great colleagues, Professor
Mark Jobling and Dr. John Wettin, who are both in the genetics department at
the
University of Leicester.
And what was great about working with them is, although they're usually
interested in the most cutting edge forensic technology, they were equally
willing to take a step back from that kind of really cutting edge forensic
innovation and help me think really, really simply and getting back to basics
with how we could implement something very easy, very cost effective in a
really difficult context.
So it's been a really great team effort.
We also had a research associate called Jessica Ritchie, who brought some of
the legal aspects to the team.
She has a background in law.
And it really was that team coming together, I think, that enabled us to
finish off the project we just finished and look forward to the next stages.
Over the last few years of the project, I've been asked on a number of
occasions,
you know, why is this kind of work so important?
Why should we care about trying to implement DNA technology or forensic
science in those sorts of environments?
And I think I always come back to this issue of impunity that exists in some
places around the world.
I mean, sexual violence is difficult to investigate under the best of
circumstances, but there are some areas globally where it really is an endemic
problem.
You know, one in three women globally is a experience of sexual violence in
their
lifetime, which is a number that's far too high.
And in some places, it's much higher than others.
And where you have impunity, where you have no prosecutions, very, very low
reporting rates, absolutely no deterrent for offenders because nobody ever gets
held accountable for these crimes.
The cycle of impunity just continues and women and girls and men are enduring
really unacceptable levels of violence in those situations.
So I think for me, the so what of this project is being able to disrupt that
cycle of impunity by implementing really, really simple forensic DNA
solutions, helping to increase the confidence of survivors to come forward
in the first place because they feel like their case will be taken seriously
and that science will be used to identify the perpetrator.
Increasing the confidence of the police, that the evidence that's being
collected is going to be of high enough integrity to make a difference to their
investigation and the confidence of the courts that they are probably
prosecuting the guilty offender and minimizing the chances of miscarriage of
justice. And that cycle will hopefully just continue beyond the life of just
this project and hopefully will continue to improve the lives of survivors by
decreasing the perpetration of sexual violence globally.
The research team is always interested to talk to people who want to learn more
about the project or indeed get involved, particularly if you work in an area
where you think that these sorts of DNA innovations might be useful to be
implemented. So very happy for people to get in touch with myself.
Using the contact details on the screen, anytime and really happy to have
discussions about other contexts where we can roll out similar projects around
the world. It's been a real pleasure participating in the HIDS events and
being able to tell you all about this project. Thanks very much for having me.
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