The problem with how Kenyan media covers femicide

On April 9, 2019, Ivy Wangechi, a sixth-year medical student at Moi University in Kenya, was murdered. The 25-year-old had just completed her ward rounds at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital when a man attacked her with an axe and killed her on the spot. Later, the man confessed, claiming that he killed Wangechi because she had romantically rejected him, even though he had “invested” in her financially.

Wangechi’s story is not an isolated one — in terms of both the facts and the media’s coverage of those facts.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 69 percent of women killed in Africa in 2017 were killed by intimate partners or family members, making it the region with the highest femicide rate in the world that year. In Kenya specifically, 42 cases of femicide were reported in local newspapers between January 1, 2019, and April 16, 2019.

Like many stories of femicides that came before Wangechi’s, the media’s depiction of this murder was problematic. A few days after the student’s death, The Daily Nation, a leading Kenyan newspaper, covered the story by using a headline that humanized Wangechi’s murderer: “Ivy Wangechi’s killer: A quiet worker and teetotaller”.  Didge, a popular radio station presenter, discussed the murder by making puns about the student being “chopped up” and said that Wangechi died because she was not loyal to her killer. Another popular media personality, Jalang’o, wrote a lengthy post on Instagram claiming that women should not accept gifts from men without being ready to deal with consequences, although he later deleted it.

The media often characterizes femicide by victim shaming and blaming.  For example, a number of Kenyan papers have referred to murdered young women as “slay queens,” which is a term used to describe a woman who pays for her luxurious lifestyle with money she gets from older men. This victim-blaming shifts the reader’s focus from the fact that a woman was killed to the suggestion that she played a part in her own murder — especially depending on her relationship status. Take Sharon Otieno, a 25-year-old student who was raped and brutally killed on the orders of her alleged lover — Migori County Governor Okoth Obado — in 2018. Instead of using Otieno’s death as a call to action against femicide, the media reduced her to a “slay queen” and depicted her story as a warning to young women  that transactional relationships can resolve in a brutal death.

Independent bloggers are arguably even bigger culprits of this sensationalizing than the mainstream media. Kenyan bloggers have made all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about high-profile female murder victims because every blogger wants their writing to be viewed even if that means using women’s deaths as clickbait. For instance, when Wangechi died, bloggers published unconfirmed reports that her killer murdered her after she infected him with HIV. These rumors got so wild that Wangechi’s family had to come out of grieving to defend her character.

When women’s deaths are not sensationalized in Kenyan media, they are often overlooked.  For example, Carol Ngumbu was 21 years old when she was murdered alongside Chris Msando, the former deputy information technology manager of Kenya’s electoral governing body, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, in 2017. While Msando’s assassination elicited public outcry, Ngumbu was largely ignored. If her death was mentioned, it was in terms of asking why she was with the powerful man and what kind of relationship she had with him.

In contrast, the media often grants perpetrators detailed stories about who they are beyond their heinous acts. Take how Wangechi’s killer was described as a quiet worker and a teetotaller, or how the media ran stories on how Sharon Otieno’s alleged killer, a high-profile politician, was adapting to life in prison.

Given that the media plays a significant role in shaping how society views the issues it covers, this careless coverage of femicide encourages Kenyans to look at these murders with mockery. When Wangechi’s story broke, some Kenyan men on Twitter proved this by making memes that claimed the “solution” to girls who spend men’s money is to chop them up with axes. Instead of using these cases to talk about unequal power relations, patriarchy, and misogyny as the causes for femicide, Kenyan media turns these occurrences into hot topic discussions. The media also frequently presents these cases as isolated incidents instead of showing how structural femicide is.

Some people, however, are working to combat this. For instance, Counting Dead Women Kenya is a Twitter account working to counter this by tracking and counting femicide cases reported in mainstream media, to show it for the crisis it is. The group Feminists in Kenya is leading an online awareness campaign of femicide under the hashtag #StopKillingUSKe. Ideally, the mainstream media will follow their examples and learn how to better use their power to spread awareness on the femicide crisis in Kenya to their massive audiences.