Kitui, 08 February, 2024 / 12:21 pm (ACI Africa).
Increased cases of violence involving family members in Kenya is “very worrying”, the Local Ordinary of the country’s Catholic Diocese of Kitui has said.
In a Tuesday, February 6 interview with ACI Africa, Bishop Joseph Maluki Mwongela condemned violent conflicts, including Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and femicide in “the strongest terms possible.”
“The whole idea about violence in families, in society, is very worrying,” Bishop Mwongela said, and referring to the rise in the reported cases of GBV and femicide in Kenya, termed the phenomenon “a national tragedy”.
Violence in Kenyan families, he said, “is a big problem that needs to be addressed and we see how we can arrest this disaster. They are isolated cases but growing by day, which is worrying.”
A January 27 report highlights some statistics about GBV and femicide in Kenya. The Aljazeera report cites Femicide Count Kenya, which monitors murders reported in local news as having “recorded 58 deaths it labelled as femicides between January and October 2022. In 2023, the organisation said it recorded at least 152 killings – the highest in the past five years.”