Justice on trial

When the police finally arrived, Woineshet took off running. The police, who say they have never seen a child covered in so much blood, arrested the suspect. Woineshet’s father, Zebene Negash, 49, who was working and living in Addis Ababa, the capital, went home, looked at his daughter and made a dramatic and unusual decision.

For months, he had heard radio announcements and seen bus ads from the Ethiopian Women Lawyers’ Association urging the prosecution of rape cases. Standing in the village square, his heart pounding, he vowed: This case would go to court.

But what happened next made him distrust not just justice, but his own common sense. The accused, Aberew Jemma Negussie, was released on bail. That same week, Negussie, a 20-year-old merchant, abducted Woineshet again, this time hiding her in his brother’s house and raping her for 15 days. She escaped again, by running through the farms and through their village, again bruised, again bloody. Even before a trial had started, the country’s struggling justice system had already failed.

In the days and months after the attacks, Woineshet’s journey took her from a poorly equipped one-room health centre to a financially strapped police station to a cramped courtroom with reluctant judges. Her story was reconstructed though dozens of interviews with family members, friends and others familiar with her plight. Woineshet and her father consented to be identified by name.

The case opens a window on a struggle in Africa between rural and tribal traditions and a quest for the rule of law in societies long without it. The continent, along with Asia, has the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. But it is often so difficult to bring assailants to justice that victims rarely turn to the judicial system.

Yet Woineshet’s example highlights an important moment of change here, as lawyers, police and family members struggle to overcome social taboos and establish a new pattern for investigating and prosecuting rape in Ethiopia.

Last year, Woineshet’s abductor was taken to court a second time, convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail. But a judge released him after he had served just one month. Woineshet and her father, backed by the Ethiopian Women Lawyers’ Association and Equality Now, an international women’s rights group, are appealing the case in Ethiopia’s highest court.

Woineshet’s family comes from the Oromo tribe, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. In the green hills of southern Ethiopia, the tribe’s men hold a firm upper hand in society and women are often treated as servants. Marriage by abduction, a common practice, occurs when a man and his friends kidnap a woman or girl he has been watching, the man rapes her and then pressures her to sign a marriage contract.

Woineshet’s father recalled that he felt caught between the draw of the modern world in the capital, and the traditions of the village. He said he was offered bribes of cows and cash by elders to keep quiet. He also endured pressure from some members of his family, who thought that Woineshet should marry her abductor.

Ethiopian law absolves abductors of their crime if they marry their victims. Other family members said they also wanted Woineshet to get married because she was no longer a virgin and therefore would never find a husband. But her father resisted. ‘‘I thought, ‘Here I am, very much happy in Addis, and women here are working and smart. They aren’t suffering all the time’,’’ he said. ‘‘I have only one daughter. And I had that dream for my daughter. That is how I got my courage. I wanted to see her happy like them.’’

After she was abducted the first time, Woineshet recalled, she was fatigued and scared. Her grandmother held her hand and fed her spicy meat and sips of coffee and water. She gently urged her to report the rape. There was no health centre in her village, and the closest bus stop was five miles away, down a long rocky hill that winds through the sloping landscape. She had to wait two days for the next bus.

‘‘She was very brave,’’ her father said. ‘‘She had berchi,’’ an Amharic term that means a passion to live, strength of conviction. With her legs bruised and her mind racing with fear that people would know what had happened, she arrived in Abomsa, an agricultural market town, where there was a health centre with one nurse.

In a small room, the nurse examined Woineshet, asked her if she had been a virgin and why her wounds looked old. She explained that she had to wait two days for the bus. Ethiopia has only one rape counselling centre—a pilot programme in the capital.

Woineshet said the nurse at the health centre took notes and held her hand. ‘‘She is no longer a virgin. Not sure of date of penetration, could be recently,’’ said the health report filed in court. ‘‘Many bruises and scratches around vagina.’’

Woineshet’s evidence was taken to a courthouse in Asela, which handles 4,000 cases a year with one computer, four judges and 10 lawyers, most of whom have had a few months of training after high school. On a recent day, Tolera Bekissa, the court’s president, thumbed through a stack of Woineshet’s files, which at times misspelled her name and got her age wrong. He said the vague notes from the health centre about her virginity were used against her.

Ellen Alem, a legal aid service coordinator with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers’ Association, said it is almost impossible to bring a rape case to court in rural areas when the victim’s virginity is questioned. She is lobbying the government to specify in the law that non-virgins can also be victims of rape and that their cases should be taken seriously.

— (LAT-WP)