Nearly five months after the Justice sector first announced it was considering to publish names of defilement and rape victims, the Senate has strongly backed the move. A damning report by the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Human Rights and Petitions left members of the Upper House shocked by the scale of sexual violence in the country, and echoed calls to start naming and shaming convicted sex offenders. The senatorial committee reported that up to 1052 people were found guilty of defilement or rape in the fiscal year 2016/17, with the cases chillingly growing to 1472 and 1621 convicts in 2017/18 and 2018/19, respectively. This would not be a first for Rwanda as the Office of the Ombudsman regularly publishes details of definitively convicted corrupt individuals, partly as a deterrence. The Senators’ call comes at a time when teen pregnancies and attendant problems have reached alarming levels, threatening to roll back the progress the country has made as far as education, birth control and poverty reduction are concerned. But compiling names of convicted sex offers is one thing, making the registry public quite another. It is critical that authorities go all the way as far as this is concerned. The registry should be made public for maximum impact. It must be noted, however, that this would just be a good start. It should be part of a more comprehensive approach that would include continued education and awareness campaigns– that target children, youth, parents, schools and other members of society–, integrating targets in fighting sex offences in the annual leaders’ performance contracts (as rightly recommended by the Senate), creating social support systems for teen parents and other victims of sexual violence, among others. We believe that these deliberate interventions, implemented in a coherent, coordinated and sustained manner, would go a long way in helping uproot this cancerous vice from society and protecting our future as a people.
