Moreover, within a period of one year, she was told, she would be able to buy out Mark from his boutique. At least three of his previous employees had done just that because Mark was all about empowering and offering a headstart to fellow youth. All these conversations between Mark and Karen were on Facebook where Mark had posted an advertisement looking for ‘a genuine hardworking salesperson’ for his Ntinda-based boutique.
The Facebook page appeared genuine with photos dating as far back last year displaying trendy unisex design clothes. The unsuspecting Karen vividly remembers the day; Thursday, June 11, 2020 when Mark told her to come with two of her trusted friends since they were both strangers meeting for the first time.
She didn’t find it necessary, but Mark insisted because she should not start on a bad note with his ‘naturally jealousy’ girlfriend whom she will need in the nearby future for tips about sales and marketing. From Constitutional square in Kampala, Mark, his purported girlfriend, one of Karen’s girlfriends and the driver set off in one vehicle while the other two girls boarded a Uber taxi – all headed to Ntinda.
All throughout, Mark and the girl-friend kept ‘receiving phone calls’ for clothes deliveries. It turned out Mark was using the self-call app where one can schedule incoming fake calls and messages with fictitious names that appear genuine.
After reaching Ntinda, Mark offered lunch for all at one of the popular restaurants since it was already lunchtime. Midway through lunch, Mark’s girlfriend excused herself after receiving a phone call and moments later, Mark’s phone call ran out of battery.
He requested Karen for her phone so he could call one of his well-paying clients to tell her was still held up in a meeting. Karen and friends didn’t realise that Mark had switched and left behind a dummy phone on the table as security when confidently walked away forever with her phone which had mo-bile money deposits of Shs 150,000.
Meanwhile, by this time the unsuspecting Uber taxi driver was also still waiting in the parking lot. When the food bill of Shs 65,000 was delivered, the ladies had no money on them and it is then that they realised Mark had conned them using a dummy phone.
Their anger fell on the Uber taxi driver, who was suspected to be Mark’s accomplice. He was briefly detained by the restaurant management before he reluctantly paid the bill. He was also taken to Ntinda police station for grilling.
Ntinda police indicated it receives many such cases of women being robbed in a similar manner and released the innocent Uber driver. The aforementioned scenario is one of the many cases of online violence against women that come in form of fraud, physical threats, sexual harassment, stalking, zoom bombing, sex trolling, defamation, hate speech, online bullying, public shaming, identity theft and hacking among other offences.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE TRAUMA
Meanwhile, Rachael Njoroge Njeri, a former Makerere University student, still lives with the mental trauma to this day. This after pictures leaked to the public showing her in compromising position with Edward Kisuze, a senior university administrative assistant, on April 13, 2018.
After a two-year trial, Kisuze was convicted on the alternative count of in-decent assault rather than prosecution’s plea for attempted rape. He paid the Shs 4 million fine and returned to his normal life but Njoroge’s professional career and social life has continued to suffer to this day.
“I genuinely don’t think the university deliberately leaked my evidence pictures because they wanted to hurt me. I later learnt that Kisuze had been severally accused of sexually harassing women in his office but the university had no evidence. It was more of the university trying to expose Kisuze but it is me who has suffered in the end,” she told The Observer recently.
She says she submitted the pictures to the vice chancellor Prof Barnabas Nawangwe and the academic registrar but was shocked they were leaked the very next day.
“The media twisted my story and reported different things. I did not know Kisuze before and neither did he know me. It was my very first time to meet him. He had locked the door and was harassing me for sex and was threatening me. Since he was persisting, I tactfully reached out to my bag to get evidence. Kisuze did not know I was taking those pictures. He would have killed me. He tried to insert his fingers in my vagina and it really hurt,” Njoroge says.
“What hurts most is the abuse and trolls I have received came from fellow women. At one time I was at Africana hotel with my friends when I saw and overhead girls talking about me. They said this is the ka-girl who refused to kuwako [have sex] with the Makerere dude,” she adds.
Later when she tried to apply for a job, she was told to first sort her “issues since your photos were all over the internet” Primah Kwagala, a lawyer with Women Probono Initiative, says online violence against women is more prevalent and has far reaching consequences than many people think.
Whereas for physical violence scars and pain may heal after sometime, many people have ended up in the mental hospital several months or even years after suffering from online violence.
Kwagala says matters have been made worse by the fact that online violence is still treated as a misdemeanor and not taken seriously. She cites the Shs 4m court fined Kisuze as not deterrent enough for future perpetuators. Meanwhile, Christine Nabutiti Wasamoyo, the advocacy and policy lead at Unwanted Witness, says it is this borderline between freedom of speech and online violence that online users must be wary of.
She says why everyone should tackle violence against women online is because women are 27 times more likely than men to face abuse online and the online gender based violence is a further stretch of the deep rooted gender inequalities existing in the physical society.
Female students, women in politics, women in journalism and women new in a job were found to be the most vulnerable and potential victims of online violence according to Nabutiti. The coronavirus pandemic where more personal and business operations have gone online, the abuses have skyrocketed.
“Like all the other things in life, everything needs preparation. Unfortunately, we don’t have preparation for someone before they get unto the internet. There is no refresher course or module for someone to get online as long as they have data and have an access platform like smartphone or computer they get online. And the people they find on the internet, they can’t tell who is new online and who is not. And you find that some of these women and girls, they found a very difficult time and unfortunately you can’t do away with internet because in-ternet now is a human right as stated by the UN. It is now the new normal, actually, people should embrace the internet more,” says Nabutiti.
WHATSAPP TROLLING
A Kampala-based radio presenter who had started a listeners WhatsApp group, recently closed the chatroom after she realized a drop in engagement. On investigation she found that some of the women were at times being shut down for ‘posting too much and irrelevancies’ while some were being conned of their money.
Another user who posted on Twitter the death of her father was told not to abuse the platform by turning Twitter into a eulogy platform.
In 2018, Kabarole Woman MP Sylvia Rwabogo sued 25-year-old student Brian Isiko who got her phone number from the parliamentary website. Initially, Isiko pleaded guilty to the cyber harassment and was subsequently sentenced to two years in jail.
But following pressure from different circles, the High court ordered for a retrial of the case. The case was dismissed this year over lack of witnesses after Rwabogo stopped attending court allegedly because even during trial, Isiko was continuing with the harassment sending her love messages in court.
Rwabogo would later lose in party primaries with the electorate ‘punishing’ her for getting Isiko arrested. But Nabutiti wants those who took Isiko’s alleged harassment lightly to imagine a similar physical scenario.
REMEDY
According to activists, to ensure gender safety online, the media has an important role to play to change people’s attitudes and understanding of online violence by highlighting the existing laws such as the Computer Misuse Act, The draft Protection and Privacy Act and the Domestic Violence Act that the abused can use to seek justice. Although the laws have been cited as weak in some cases, they still offer a glim protection of col-lected user data.
fkisakye@observer.ug
The article is published with support from Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA)
