When you hear about something bad happening to someone else,
you never think it will happen to you.
And if it does by chance happen to you, you want to believe that whoever
harmed you would be punished by the justice system. Before joining the Peace Corps, I heard about sexual assault
cases but never thought I’d be one of the victims. I was lucky in a lot of ways that things didn’t go worse
than they did, but I still wanted the offender to be punished.
After the assault, it took the police over a month to catch
the offender. Once they did, I
decided to press charges. I was
not only pressing charges to ensure my own safety but also the safety of the
girls in the village. My host
sisters were terrified of this young man.
In order to press charges, I had to sit in a room next to the guy who
assaulted me while I explained my story to the Commandant. I was told I would go to trial any time
in the next 6 months.
A week after pressing charges, a guy I knew from Nafadji
passed me on his motorcycle and said that my trial date was the following
Friday. I was incredibly
confused. How did this random guy
know my trial date? I called the
Commandant, and he said he still didn’t know when my trial was going to
be. Turns out the random guy was
right, and I’m lucky that I bumped into him. I didn’t get my Summons until less than 24 hours before the
trial, and I had to travel to another region since there’s no court in my
region. Either they were hoping I
wouldn’t be able to make it to the trial, or this was just another indicator of
this broken and inefficient system.
My friend LaRocha traveled up to the neighboring region for
the trial, and we went to court the following morning with a Volunteer Support
Assistant (VSA). Since the
offender was a 16-year-old boy, the trial was in a juvenile court, which was
closed to the public. Before the
trial, we were sitting on a bench outside the courthouse, and a woman came up
and greeted me by name. I thought
it was odd that someone in this other region would know my Senegalese name, and
I quickly realized that it was the offender’s mother. She stood in front of me and removed her head wrap and then
her shirt, and began bowing down to me topless, begging for my
forgiveness. I felt incredibly
uncomfortable, and thankfully the VSA asked her to stand up and put her shirt
back on. As bad as I felt for this
woman, she wasn’t going to change my mind about going to trial.
In the courtroom, I was seated at a rectangular table with
the offender’s mother to my left and a translator to my right. Across the table was a panel with the
judge, procureur, juvenile program director, etc. The part that still baffles me is that the offender was
asked to stand behind my chair.
His hand was on my chair throughout most of the trial, gripping it
tightly.
The trial seemed to be going well, because the boy admitted
that he was guilty. The procureur gave
a long speech about how this young man was a menace to society. His crimes were getting worse (this is
the same young man who stole a backpack out of my hut the year before). He has stolen from others in the
village and may have done worse things to the young women in the village. The mother admitted that she couldn’t
control the young man anymore. It
was obvious to me that this boy would be sentenced to a detention center. At the end of all of the speeches, the
judge announced that the offender would go back to my village with his mother. What?!?
At this point, I was in tears and couldn’t believe my
ears. How could they send an
offender who they referred to as a “menace to society” back to the
village? It made absolutely no
sense. Thanks to the help of some
friends outside the courtroom, the procureur agreed to meet with us to explain
the sentence. Apparently they didn’t
think that there were any spots open in a rehabilitation center, so there was
nowhere else they could move him.
The part that angered me the most is that this man said to me “this is
Africa, nothing works here”. He
blamed the faulty justice system on lack of resources and the nature of third
world countries. My friend asked
the juvenile program director if he could call the detention centers that
moment to find out if there was a spot since they hadn’t even checked. His response was that “this is Africa,
things are slow here”. These cop
out answers reflect the fatalistic nature of this culture once again. No one believes they can change
anything since everything is up to Allah to change. They accept things the way they are, even when systems like
this are clearly broken.
Lucky for me, I’m an American. Once the U.S. Embassy and Peace Corps put pressure on the
court, magically a spot opened up in a detention center. But what if I wasn’t an American? What if I was a Senegalese woman who
had been sexually assaulted or raped?
After seeing the dysfunctional nature of the justice system, I may not
have even bothered going to the police if I knew I wouldn’t have been taken
seriously.
Things seemed to finally be falling into place. I set up my new site in Saraya and was
prepared to move in this week. The
papers for the offender to move to the detention center went through, and he is
ready to move there. But there’s a
catch. Tabaski, the biggest Muslim
holiday of the year, is tomorrow.
Everything shuts down for the holiday, including the detention
center. The center closes, and all
of the juvenile delinquents get to spend Tabaski with their families. This means the offender was released
back to my village unsupervised for the holiday. This makes complete sense, right? Let’s send all the criminals home for the holidays!
This justice system is broken, and the saga of my assault
has been an exhausting one. I’ve
had to fight every step of the way to get justice, and I still am not sure if
everything is going to work out.
As frustrating as this experience has been for me, I can’t even imagine
what a Senegalese woman would have to deal with in a similar situation. This system needs to be fixed, but I
don’t know where someone would even begin. Maybe the first step is that people whose jobs it is to
provide justice need to believe that they can change the system. If no one tries to change anything and
people continue to use “this is Africa” as an excuse for faulty systems, then
they are only reinforcing the system’s dysfunctional nature. Instead of being stuck in this
self-fulfilling prophecy, someone needs to break with tradition and do what is
just.