What Americans can learn from one Extraordinary Ugandan Female Leader: Part 1 of an Interview with Ms. Hellen Tanyinga, Founder and Executive Director of the Rape Hurts Foundation

An extraordinary woman can do extraordinary things out of horrific circumstances. Hellen Tanyinga is such a woman. In 2009, Ms. Tanyinga started the Rape Hurts Foundation (RHF), an NGO in Uganda to help girls and women who have suffered abuse in its many forms and to stop human trafficking. She understood the impact of rape. She was raped as a child while getting water for her family. As she told me “I named the foundation ‘Rape Hurts’ because rape hurts.” 

The Rape Hurts Foundation has now expanded to support children who are at risk of abuse, including boys who are increasingly the targets for sexual abuse. Ms. Tanyinga is not simply supporting girls and women who have been raped or trafficked. She is changing the culture by changing how girls, boys, and women perceive themselves and giving them the means to control their destiny.  

What surprised me was the similarities between many victims of abuse in Uganda and the US: Women who have limited financial power, who are isolated from people who could help them, who have grown accustomed to intimate partner abuse and who are unaware of their rights.

What became thought-provoking, was the systematic way that the Rape Hurts Foundation is going after these problems. They are tackling the root cause of what is a cultural problem—paternalism, female financial insecurity and lack of knowledge, and lack of safeguards to protect the most vulnerable children.  

I had the privilege of interviewing Ms. Tanyinga. This is the first part of a two-part interview.

Why did you start the Rape Hurts Foundation?

I was raped at the age of 11 when I was just coming from [getting] the water and the perpetrator who raped me went free. My mom was silenced and we promised never [to] talk about it. For that pain and what I saw my mom going through when she wanted to speak, I felt like I should be the person to speak for others that cannot speak for themselves.

In 2008 after just completing my university, I with a few friends of mine formed the Rape Hurts Foundation [to] advocate for the rights of women and children who are being abused daily and no one is there to defend them. [They are abused] because they are ignorant, they have never gone to school and they [have] fear. 

It [RHF] is fully functioning up to today to advocate for the rights of women and children, as well as help them empower themselves so that they can be able to defend themselves.

What are some of the challenges that the victims of gender-based violence face in your community?

We work with the victims of GBV, as well as girls that have been trafficked in the Middle East and those that have to face FGM (female genital mutilation). 

We are facing challenges of late (delayed) justice. For example, you find that a child has been raped and the mother— still today with a modern Uganda—if she goes to the police, that perpetrator pays the police. The [process] goes slowly. We as RHF will come in in a way that can help them. They are being denied their rights. We go forward and help them and at least speed up the process.

There is a high rate of corruption in the country whereby still you find that the perpetrator is known, but no one [the victim] is there to speak because this person has money. Or, being a man, you find that they [the perpetrator] have more financial ability compared to women, so they bribe the police. They bribe the judiciary. So you find that such cases just go [away].

Another challenge [is that] the victims that we work with, the survivors, suffer [from] excessive fatigue. [In] my community, women get married as early as thirteen. You find that they are financially unstable. So you find that they are repeatedly abused and they become comfortable in the abuse because they have nowhere to go. They have no choice. So the only choice is to go through that pain. As long as their children can survive, or this girl can grow up or she can still attend education, she goes through that process of abuse. No one is there to defend them. 

What is the Rape Hurts Foundation doing to change the dynamic of abuse?

So as Rape Hurts we say that every woman in the community where we're now working should be empowered, should have a skill. Even if we go ahead as RHF, going around the world creating awareness, spreading the Gospel of women's rights, but then we are not giving them a break, we’re not giving them food, we’re not giving them financial support—the process just goes on and on. 

So we are empowering them as well so that they can be equal.

What keeps girls and women from speaking up and seeking help?

The reason why my mom and I went through that pain, it's because my mom had no choice. She had nowhere to run to, because in Africa once you get married, then you had to stay there. You had nowhere to run to. She goes through the pain because she doesn't want [disgrace] her family. Remember when you're raped then you cannot get married. So you're wrecked and you don't want even to speak about it because you don't get a chance of getting married. 

What are some of the programs being supported by the Rape Hurts Foundation?

Some of the programs that we are running as RHF [support] women empowerment. We thought since the biggest number of women in the community are uneducated and they feel like they can't even go to school, we decided to formulate life skill projects. 

If someone is a victim, survivors or at risk of being a victim of GBV or trafficking in person, you’re going to be struggling so hard to get up to the country (i.e. move up in the world). Especially girls. You find that these girls are being sent to the Middle East to gain work. They send girls [for trafficking] because they feel like they are not of use. So if you're dying in the UAE or dying in the country, it's no sort of a pain to the family because you're just a woman. Instead of wasting all that time and life, we said that such girls who are at risk of being trafficked, who [are] at risk of suffering GBV, we [will] fund life skill projects such as tailoring, fashion, and design.

So far we have 1,500 girls that have gone through the process of fashion and design. We have examples of girls who exhibited their fashion skills with [the] Italian embassy. Other girls are working in other areas of fashion and design and empowering themselves—and even supporting their families and siblings. 

We have a carpentry school for both girls and boys where they can do carpentry [making] wood chairs, windows, doors. We have fabrication of metals with girls joining in as well. We do knitting we do bead making.

Every time there is a girl who comes in and she's unemployed, we make sure we skill them. If someone has learned how to sew or learned how to make beads (jewelry) or knitting, we supply them with the material and we pay them for the work. We then buy these products and we resell them. So this helps us. The women can stay sustainable. 

Tell us about your micro-financing efforts

We've also formed different microcredit groups. So far we have 10 groups in different villages around Jinja. We thought that women can [not] save anything, because they believe they're not employees. They used to spend the money they got, probably on cheap things, but a woman can save.

We have a group of women who never believed that at all, and now as we talk, the group of 30 women, they have saved over $3,500 —which seemed so impossible to them. And they don't even believe it themselves. 

They have success stories. Some of them have been able to buy solar energy in their homes. They have opened up businesses, they have taken their kids to school.