KELIN, in partnership with the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance (RHRA) and with support from Planned Parenthood Global (Africa Regional Offices) is conducting a three day police workshop themed: Human Rights Approach to Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. The training will be held from 17to 19 March, 2015 at the Provincial Police Training Centre, Nairobi and 23 to 27 March, 2015 at Kiganjo Police College.
This workshop aims to achieve the following five key objectives:
- Introduce police officers to the concept of sexual and reproductive health and rights from a medical and human rights perspective;
- to familiarize police officers on the statistics on maternal deaths in Kenya in line with recent studies conducted by the Ministry of Health and Kenya Medical Association;
- To build an understanding of the laws regulating reproductive health in Kenya
- To sensitize police officers on what action they can take in order to secure more convictions against perpetrators and contribute towards reduction of incidences of rape unsafe abortion and maternal deaths.
Police officers were chosen as a key group for this workshop in light of the investigative role they play in regard to issues of sexual and reproductive health more particularly in matters of rape, incest, defilement, unsafe abortion and sexual and gender based violence. These police officers have been selected from various stations within Nairobi County with a majority of them stationed near slum dwellings where the statistics indicate higher violation rates on the above mentioned offences.
The partners anticipate that as a result of this workshop and other workshops that they will undertake with the Kenya Police Service in 2015, there will be an increase in the number of officers sensitized on the issues, an increase in the number of functional gender-desks at police stations that take into account SRHR issues, an increase in the number of convictions on cases relating to sexual assault and lastly a decrease in the number of women and girls dying in police cells as a result of incarceration without medical care following arrests on charges of unsafe abortion.
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