Six years after being kidnapped, I finally made it home

Imagine one minute, sitting with your friends and talking outside your home – and the next you’re being threatened with guns, blindfolded, and dragged into a forest.

That’s what happened to me when I was just 13.

I was kidnapped, tortured, and used as a sex slave – and I am one of the lucky ones because I survived.

I lived in a small town in Kenya on the border with Somalia, close to a thick forest. For as long as I can remember, a terrorist group called the al-Shabaab have invaded our communities and snatched women and girls, particularly virgins, to be slaves – for labour, for sex, or to be sold.

When men stormed our town at gunpoint and bundled about 30 of us into a truck, I had never been so frightened. We were driven a short distance then blindfolded and forced to walk barefoot through the dense forest, with thorns ripping at our legs and our feet covered in blood and bruises. Some men tied ropes around the women and dragged them along like a cow.

We knew we were in the forest – we could hear the men cutting their way through the trees and it’s where al-Shabaab had been hiding out for years.

When we arrived at camp, women were put to work cooking, washing clothes, or fetching water. Some stronger ones were trained to use guns. But our main purpose was to be there for the men – to give them massages or be their sexual play thing.

I just did what I was told and in the hardest moments prayed for God. I knew my mother would be praying for me too so it helped me feel close to her somehow.

Early on, I was told to co-operate to have the best chance of survival and I was too frightened to do anything else. Women who didn’t behave were lashed with a whip made from leather and a stick, or forced to crawl over a piece of wood with nails sticking up from it. Multiple men would rape us at the same time.

I was beaten so badly it caused an infection that left my skin peeling off. And we were starving, barely surviving on the men’s leftovers of rice, spaghetti or edamame.

I’d gone from being a child with dreams of becoming a lawyer and having a family of four kids to being imprisoned in a forest. When the women were together washing clothes or fetching water we would cry and comfort each other, saying: ‘One day we will get out of here.’

Our chances were slim. People had died on the way to the camp or been killed while there. We were too frightened to escape.

Women who didn’t behave were lashed with a whip made from leather and a stick, or forced to crawl over a piece of wood with nails sticking up from it

One of my kidnappers got me pregnant and I think he wanted us to both survive. When I was eight months pregnant, he took me when he went to loot a town for food and left me on the outskirts by a road.

This was my chance to flee after six years since first being captured. I was pale, weak and heavily pregnant but somehow I made it to a nearby town where leaders got me food and water.

When I asked a girl where we were and she said my home town, I couldn’t believe it as we had been moving from camp to camp for six years. We must have come full circle.

A girl took me to the mosque, as I remembered it being near my house, and the imam called my parents. When I saw my mum I just said: ‘Mama’ and cried.

She could barely believe it was me – I was 19 but smaller than when I’d left as a child because I was starving. I was covered in bruises and scars.

My parents took me in and looked after me and my baby after I gave birth. I named her Judy.

But I was shunned by people in the village and I wasn’t allowed to go back to school. They thought I was a spy and had come back from the camp to feed information back to the terrorists so they could take more girls. It was seen as shameful that I had had a baby and wasn’t married, especially as the baby’s father was a terrorist.

I had been through so much and was now being punished for it.

With my family, I moved to a town around an hour’s drive away. I went back to school and I met a new man and we married. We had two children together – Jacky, now 14, and Jacinta, now six – but I found it hard to trust and was still affected by what happened so our marriage broke down.

My family were supportive of me but I was now a single mum with three kids. In 2017, I met Alice in my town and we realised we had been at one of the camps together and had been through the same ordeal. Alice said: ‘We should do something to help these women.’

First, we had to break down the stigma and that meant having the courage to tell our own stories. We went to our community leaders and the leaders of our mosque and explained what happened. We said: ‘When you listen, it’s like a movie but this is what we went through.’

We showed them our scars and explained that none of the women wanted to be taken. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone. As for spying, we explained it was so bad in the camps no one would go back once they got out. They listened and they finally understood.

Alice and I set up Awer Women Empowerment (AWER) to help women who had been through what we had. Anyone who escaped from the camps would be taken to a safe house, given medical care and counselling. We told them our stories to show they had nothing to be ashamed of.

Often, if the women were pregnant or had children from the terrorists, they were shunned and would have no way of making an income, meaning some had to sell their body. We trained them in skills like bag-making, cooking, and business management to create self-reliance.

It was hard seeing so many women affected by the terrorists but was empowering to see attitudes change and see these women become CEOs of their own businesses. We received funding from The Circle, a charity co-founded by singer Annie Lennox, and with their support we have reached out to thousands of women.

The Circle doesn’t just help charities like ours – it provides support to grassroots organisations in places like South Sudan, Gaza and Afghanistan and it campaigns to end violence against women and girls. Worldwide, one in three women and girls will experience violence in their lifetime.

Turning my experience into something that helps other women makes me feel good, but women and girls are still being kidnapped by the al-Shabaab and we need to see governments act to end it. This International Women’s Day, we need everyone to come together and fight for women’s rights.

Where I live (and in many places) women have rights on paper but not on the ground. They are not valued and are treated like a different species.

There is gender-based violence, with women killed daily. A man of 60 or 70 can marry a girl of 13. And when a husband beats you and you report it, you are told it is your fault for misbehaving.

The answer is education and awareness – and women coming together to show the way forward.

The women I help say I give them hope. I’m not ashamed to share what I have been through with the world.

I hope my testimony will encourage change and save other women’s lives.

As told to Catherine Jones

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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