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completely overcome the trauma. “It’s like tearing a paper into many pieces. No matter how carefully you try to put the pieces together again, the paper will never be the same. That’s what sexual assault does.” One little girl at the shelter begins to cry every night when it starts to get dark and the curtains are drawn. “It’s the hour when her father used to come and rape her,” Chidi says.
    In the program at Tumaini Centre, the girls stay for six weeks; they receive prophylaxis drugs to prevent HIV/AIDS and pregnancy as soon as they arrive and medical care and counselling for the duration. If it isn’t safe for them to return home, they go to a boarding school or stay on in the residence at the centre. Those who go home come back once a month for six months and then every three months for ongoing counselling and support. When I visited, there were eleven girls in residence.
    One of them, a fifteen-year-old called Luckline, had been raped by a neighbour. She was thirty-nine weeks pregnant when we met. When she talked about what happened to her, she didn’t sound like a victim. She sounded like a girl who wanted to get even, to make a change. She said, “This happened to me on May 13, 2010. I will make sure this never happens to my sister.” When I asked what she would do after the baby was born, she said she wanted to return to school because she planned to become a poet. With little prompting, she read me one of her poems.
Here I come
Walking down through history to eternity
From paradise to the city of goods
Victorious, glorious, serious and pious
Elegant, full of grace and truth
The centrepiece and the masterpiece of literature
Glowing, growing and flowing
Here, there, everywhere
Cheering millions every day
The book of books that I am .
    This from a teenager who is disadvantaged in every imaginable way. Yet she was preparing to sue her government for failing to protect her. This is how change happens. But it takes commitment and colossal personal strength for a girl to tackle the status quo and claim a better future for herself.
    Back in Nairobi, I visit with Nano, a magistrate in the children’s court. She insisted that her full name not be used, as she must be seen as totally impartial both to the children and to the system that she criticizes. “The difficulty,” she said, “is that the policelack knowledge of the law. Not all but most need training and sensitization around sexual assault.” And, she said, “It’s hard to get evidence from children; they need psychologists and counsellors to talk to them, and the Kenyan legal system simply doesn’t have that resource. Even some magistrates lack training and knowledge of the Sexual Offences Act.” Of the few cases that have made it to the court, she said, “The difficulty is they come without the information I need to convict. The girls block it out or don’t turn up. There are all kinds of judicial tools I can use: CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women], the Children’s Convention, even the new Sexual Offences Act legislation in Kenya. The investigating officer needs to tell the court what has been found, the charge sheets have to be drafted correctly and the child needs to be able to tell the officer what happened; if she can, she needs to identify the man who defiled her and say, ‘He is the one who did this to me.’ The children have to be prepared for this. Without it, I cannot convict.”
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    After that conversation with the magistrate, I sat in on the meeting that the team of lawyers was holding in a hotel across town. While diesel-belching buses and the traffic chaos in Nairobi created cacophony outside, the lawyers hunkered over their files at a long narrow table creating a strategy for the case. They debated the wording, parsing every sentence, nitpicking the legal clauses, testing the jurisprudence. They knew it would take collaboration between lawyers, doctors and academics, experts