Welcome to SHE ACHIEVES
Founded in 2020, She Achieves is a Community-Based Organization based in Narok County, Kenya whose primary goal is to champion the rights of women and girls with disabilities.
The creation of She Achieves was informed by an appreciation on the part of its creators that women and girls with disabilities are extremely vulnerable to sexual and gender based violence and are ill equipped to seek redress when they are abused.
The objectives of the organization is to promote the Sexual Reproductive Health Rights of Women and Girls with disabilities and to mitigate and respond to Gender-Based Violence against women and girls with disabilities.
The main causes of this state of affairs are:
Stigmatization of Girls and Women with Disabilities.
In a lot of cultures, women with disabilities are viewed as a curse and a bad omen. Very often, they are hidden and not allowed to interact with the rest of the community.
Their exclusion makes them a soft target and those who have excluded them will hardly believe them if they reported having been abused.
Communication Barriers.
Women and Girls with mental disabilities may not know how to express the fact that they have been abused. This creates a culture of silence around the violation of their rights and their abusers have nothing to fear.
Limited Knowledge among Duty Bearers
The assumption that women with mental disabilities are either unable to give consent for any action or do no not need to give consent, including for sexual intercourse is ill founded.
Inadequate Legal Framework
Lack of progressive laws on sexual violence committed against mentally disabled women and girls hampers efforts towards supporting them.
While the Protection Against Domestic Violence Act and the Sexual Offences Act are quite effective in addressing gender based violence and sexual violence against normally abled people, they fail to take into account the challenges specific to women and girls with mental disabilities.
Additionally, Section 146 of the Kenyan Penal Code refers to them as “idiots and imbeciles,” which is derogatory.