Nicholas Kristof: The case for throwing stones from a glass house

When she finally had the chance to confront her rapist in open court in Nairobi, Kenya, she didn’t flinch. “What you did was bad,” she told the pastor. “Don’t do that to any other girl.”

And he won’t. At age 74, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assaulting her and others. But the devastation lingers for the petite and fragile Kenyan girl in braids who was repeatedly raped by the pastor when she was just 7 years old.

“I trusted him because he said he was a man of God,” she told me. Now 13, she says she didn’t understand what he was doing to her. But she knew it hurt, and she was terrified when he warned, “If you tell your parents, I’ll kill you.”

Violence against women is a serious problem in the United States, of course. But there has been some progress in America while in many countries a cloak of silence continues to enable such violence. This is one of the great moral struggles of our time, and we should exercise bipartisan American global leadership to address it. President-elect Donald Trump has talked a good game about prioritizing the fight against human trafficking and child exploitation, and here’s a chance to do so.

A new United Nations report estimates that 51,000 women and girls were killed last year around the world by their partners or family members – the equivalent of a good-size war. The highest number of these femicides, and the highest rate per capita, was in Africa, the U.N. found.

Here in Nairobi, a survey found that the first sexual experience of a majority of women in the sprawling warren of alleys that make up the Kibera slum was rape. UNICEF reported this year a global survey finding that one-third of girls in Oceania had been sexually assaulted by the age of 18, along with 22% of girls in Africa; a smaller but still significant number of boys had been sexually assaulted.

It is awkward for us to talk about problems linked to other cultures. Are we hypocritical? Aren’t we a flawed messenger when our president-elect himself was found liable in court for sexual abuse? If I speak up, does that make me a white savior engaging in Western cultural imperialism?

My wife, Sheryl WuDunn, has a fitting answer when people accuse Americans of cultural imperialism. A Chinese American, Sheryl notes that her grandmother’s feet were bound and says, thank God Westerners spoke out about foot binding, imposing their values and sparing future generations of Chinese girls such a fate.

We need the humility to acknowledge that we haven’t come near to solving these issues in the United States. But at least we discuss them openly, shattering taboos – and throwing stones from a glass house is still preferable to silence as women and girls are murdered and assaulted in large numbers around the world.

At a shelter called Kara Olmurani in Nairobi, I interviewed the girl raped by the pastor. (The girls in this story asked that I not use their names, and I’ve obliged.) The shelter, a large, bustling house behind a high wall on the edge of town, is home to 18 girls who’ve been sexually abused and five young children who were the product of rape. A sign in the living room reads: I am a girl, smart, strong and beautiful. When I arrived, the girls were festive in masks and colored braids for their holiday party, their playfulness a tribute to human resilience.

Kara Olmurani was founded by Terry Gobanga, a Kenyan minister who had been kidnapped in Nairobi on the morning of her wedding day in 2004. The attackers gang-raped and stabbed her, then dumped her on the road from a moving car. As Gobanga’s friends gathered for her wedding, she was unconscious and fighting for her life in a hospital bed.

After recovering and marrying seven months later, Gobanga resolved to help others suffering from sexual violence and turned her house into a shelter. I wrote about Kara two years ago, and Times readers then donated $120,000, which allowed the organization to expand and start a branch in Malawi as well.

While speaking out is important, it can also create a resentful backlash that amplifies the problem (which has sometimes happened with denunciations of female genital mutilation). What works best is for Americans to support organizations pushing for change from within a culture and give them the microphones.

That’s the context in which I admire Kenyan groups like Kara Olmurani and Shining Hope for Communities (which works to empower slum residents in Nairobi, especially girls). Both groups support victims but also work with the police to send perpetrators to prison.

Even at a time when Americans are deeply divided, we should still be able to work together to end impunity for brutality toward women and girls. One model has been the successful and bipartisan effort to tackle human trafficking, bringing together liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals. Republicans and Democrats worked together over the past 25 years to reduce the number of girls sold into modern slavery in countries like Cambodia and the Philippines.

This was a humanitarian triumph – but Congress let the landmark anti-trafficking legislation lapse in 2021. It should promptly be revived.

Congress should also pass the long-stalled bipartisan International Violence Against Women Act, which would establish a State Department office for women’s issues and elevate issues of gender violence.

At Kara Olmurani, a slight girl in braids broke my heart. She was wearing a bracelet that read “joy,” but as she told me her story she was soon weeping.

A man had attacked her in the fields when she was 12, and he raped her so brutally that she suffered an internal injury called a fistula, leaving her incontinent. She has required seven surgeries to repair the damage.

“Men should have self-control,” she said earnestly. “They should be trained not to attack children.”

She paused and gulped some air to steady herself. “And if he does something bad to a girl, he should be punished.”

I hope Congress is listening. One of the epic moral battles of this century is against human trafficking and violence against women, so why would Americans of any political stripe want to stay passive on the sidelines?

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at the New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, 10018.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.