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her native Kiswahili (a local dialect of Swahili), “Nasikia uchungu sana nikienda choo, kukojoa.” It hurts to go to the bathroom.
    Doreen, fifteen, has a four-month-old baby as a result of being raped by her cousin. Her mother is mentally ill. Her father left them years ago, and they had moved in with her mother’s sister. When she realized she was pregnant, her aunt told her to have an abortion; when her uncle found out, he beat her and threw her out of the house. She was considering suicide when she heard about Ripples and came to their Tumaini Centre—a Swahili word that means “hope.”
    In Kenya a girl child is raped every thirty minutes, some as young as three months old. If a girl doesn’t die of her injuries, she faces abandonment; families don’t want anything to do with girls who have been sexually assaulted. She almost certainly loses the chance to get an education. Some can’t go to school anymore because they’ve been raped by the teacher. Others are prohibitedby the stigma; the girls are doubly victimized by being ostracized. They often become HIV-positive as a result of rape, so their health is compromised. Urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases plague them. Without an education, with poor health and no means of financial support, the girls drift into poverty.
    Twenty-five percent of Kenyan girls aged twelve to twenty-four lose their virginity due to rape. An estimated 70 percent never report it to the authorities, and only one-third of the reported cases wind up in court. If the prosecutor can prove that a girl was under the age of fifteen when she was assaulted, the rapist’s sentence is life in prison. But there’s the rub. The laws are not enforced, and rape is on the rise. More than 90 percent know their assailant—fathers, grandfathers, uncles, teachers, priests—the very people assigned the task of keeping vulnerable children safe. And raping little girls as a way of cleansing themselves from HIV/AIDS isn’t the only reason they act. Says Hedaya Atupelye, a social worker I met at the shelter run by the Women’s Rights Awareness Program in Nairobi, “Men think having sex with a little girl is a sign of being wealthy and stylish. Some of these men are educated beyond the graduate level, but they want to be the first to break the flower so they seek out young girls.”
    If it’s the breadwinner who’s guilty, the family will go hungry if he’s sent to jail, so even a child’s mother will choose to remain silent. “It’s our African culture,” says Kimanze. “No one wants to associate with one who’s been raped or who’s lived in a shelter. We need to stand up and say the shame isn’t ours, it’s yours.”
    In Kenya people can pay to have their police charges disappear. Or they can bribe a police officer and no charges will be laid. If the case is taken seriously, statements are taken, the child is sent to a doctor for examination and the file with the doctor’sreport is returned to the police. “This is also where money changes hands,” says Hedaya. “If a girl, or for that matter a woman, goes to the police on her own she is usually ridiculed and harassed. It was suggested half a dozen years ago that the police create a gender desk where a female would be safe in reporting the crime, but invariably the gender desk isn’t manned and is covered with dust.”
    “One of the challenges is that our culture doesn’t allow us to speak out about sexual things,” says Mercy Chidi. “My only advice from my mother when I got my period was ‘Don’t play with boys; you’ll get pregnant.’ My own uncle tried to rape me, and to this day I have not told my mother. We have to break this silence.”
    When the girls arrive at the shelter, she says, they are severely traumatized and don’t want to talk to anyone. Some are frightened, others aggressive. They tend to pick on one another. And as much as they come around and begin to heal, Mercy says that they never