Today’s NYT has a story called: “For Young, Justice as Impoverished as Africa.” The premise of the piece is pretty much encapsulated in the fourth paragraph, which reads:
Juvenile justice here [in sub-Saharan Africa] is, in almost every sense, an oxymoron. This region’s nations endorse international norms for fairness and humanity, employ dedicated staff members and benefit from foreign donations, yet Africa’s juvenile-justice systems routinely, almost blithely, deliver injustice and brutality instead.
Here is one part of the article that particularly troubled me:
Little Money and No Luck
Ambrose, a 17-year-old with hooded eyes, hails from Mpigi, west of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He is detained in the Naguru Remand Home in Kampala, a complex of brick halls, their windows shrouded in wire mesh, built in 1954 for 45 inmates. On this day, it holds 98.
The crime he is accused of : and which he denies : is having sex with his employer’s 16-year-old daughter. Underage sex is called defilement here, and 36 of Naguru’s 86 boys, ages 12 to 17, face defilement charges. The penalty, in theory, is death.
The boys’ greatest offense, however, is being unlucky. Defilement frequently amounts to blackmail. A boy who pays a girl’s parents for violating her virginity almost always goes free; one who cannot often faces prosecution, even if the girl was a willing partner. Girls cannot be similarly charged.
Ambrose could not produce 70,000 shillings, or $40, to mollify the girl’s parents. He has not gone to trial, and already he has paid a heavy penalty.
“I spent two weeks in a police cell,”he said.”I was beaten. I was forced to make statements which I wasn’t willing to make. I was being forced to accept that I really defiled that girl.”
That was last December. Ambrose has spent a year behind Naguru’s wire mesh waiting for a trial, even though Uganda law limits such pretrial detentions to six months. The reason is that capital charges must be heard by Uganda’s High Court : and the High Court docket is swamped.
“Over 50 percent of cases heard by the high court are defilement cases,”said Richard Buteera, Uganda’s director of public prosecutions.”Cases come in from all over the country.”For defilement trials, some children wait two years. The High Court is short of money to assemble lawyers, witnesses and evidence for hearings. The remand home’s deficits are even more basic.
I have no idea how or why boys in this part of Africa get charged with “defilement,” but I have to wonder if the “defiled” girls are every truly “willing partners,” because my guess is that most are rape victims. While it is unquestionably wrong not to offer a fair and speedy trial to the accused “defilers,” the blame-the-girls tone of this section really bothered me.
–Ann Bartow
