Rethinking Justice: An Analysis of State Responses to Gender Based Violence in Kenya

This study assesses the implementation of Gender Based Violence (GBV) policy in Kenya and state responses. The following objectives guided this study; to analyze the response mechanisms that have been put in place to curb GBV in Kenya, to examine the challenges and or the gaps that hinder the effective implementation and enforcements of the response measures during humanitarian crisis and pandemics, and finally to evaluate how GBV culminated to femicide. Gender-based Violence affects women throughout their life cycle. This violence takes multiple forms, including intended acts or omissions that would likely result to physical, economical, sexual, psychological harm or death. GBV against women is exacerbated by cultural, religious, social crisis, civil unrest or during humanitarian crisis. The findings of this study indicates that access to justice for women who have experienced GBV is three dimensional: raising awareness of women‘s rights and improving the laws and policies; redressing and strengthening institutional responses to GBV; raising the repercussions to men who engage in GBV by either establishing or increasing the criminal sanctions. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an exponential spike in the cases of femicide in Kenya resulting into a ‗shadow pandemic‘. Health, security and finances were compounded on the strains of living amid lockdown, leaving reports of violence against women adjunct. This study employed a qualitative research design and it adopted a mixed method of data collection which involved secondary data featuring published content that may be in form of documents, reports, publications, articles, and other media reports that highlight any information regarding the implementation of effective GBV response mechanisms framework in Kenya.