Gender Based Violence

Women face Gender-Based Violence (GBV) from inception to death including:

• Prenatal sex selection in favor of boys.
• Sexual violence including defilement, incest, female genital cutting (FGM), rape
• Early and forced marriages
• Human trafficking and forced [labour] prostitution
• Dowry related violence whereby in life a husband batters a wife due to fact that he paid a lot of dowry for her
• In death the body of a woman is withheld from burial because dowry has not been settled

Women have reproductive rights, and marital rape is against the law in Kenya. Women have a right to be respected. Marital rape is generally defined as unwanted intercourse obtained by a woman's husband or ex-husband through force, threat of force, or when she is unable to consent.

Married women are at high risk of HIV in countries where transmission occurs primarily through heterosexual sex and cultural norms condone male promiscuity and/or patriarchal control of the married couple's sexual activity.

Reproductive rights encompass an individual's freedom to determine the number, spacing and timing of their children; the right to access the information necessary to make such determinations HIV positive women face numerous barriers to the realization of these rights, including both laws and informed practices that restrict reproductive freedom. Many of these restrictions- such as forced or coerced sterilization, recommended abstinence from sex and childbearing, and compulsory HIV testing- are allegedly designed to prevent the birth of HIV positive children.