With recent baseline reporting by the police capturing more than 12,700 child victims of defilement in a single year, 30 legal reforms are being drafted to combat sexual offences against children in Uganda that remain at critically high levels.
A legislative and advocacy agenda for strengthening child protection systems, put together by civil society organisations (CSOs) inclined to children’s welfare and protection, has floated proposals to amend the Constitution, the Children Act, the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act and the Penal Code Act to provide tangible safeguards.
This comes against the backdrop of empirical evidence indicating that one in three girls and one in six boys suffer from sexual abuse. The statistics point to the fact that Uganda, which has one of the youngest populations globally, has a big demographic of minors aged under 18 exposed to predatory risks, most of which go unpunished. Consequently, CSOs want 21 reviews to be made to the Children Act. They have also proffered five reviews apiece to the Constitution and the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act.
Mr Moses Ntenga, the executive director of Joy for Children, Uganda (JFC-U), says the proposed amendments are long overdue. It is a position that Mr John Tamale Mirundi, the Principal Legislative and Procedural Counsel at Parliament, concurs with.
‘This legislative agenda is intended to initiate and promote legislation that fosters holistic development of all the children in Uganda, by dealing with the issues that hinder the full potential and protection of children,’ Mr Mirundi says.
‘Its implementation will ensure a more just and safe Uganda and will support the lives of Ugandan children through policy and legislative reforms,’ he adds.
Sex offender registry
Plans to “respond to the crimes of child marriage and other gender and sexual violence by amending legislation to address the evolving and current social attitudes, values and sexual practices involving children in order to curb sexual violence against children’ are laid out in the 20-page legislative agenda. Some of what the agenda calls ‘international best practices’ include creating a sex offender’s register. Uganda lacks a fully operational sex offender registry due to legal confidentiality rules in current criminal procedures.
‘The rationale for establishing a sex offender register is based on the realisation that sex offenders are likely to re-offend even after punishments,’ the legislative agenda says, adding, ‘The sex offenders’ register is one of the ways through which the public is informed of the existence of sex offenders within their neighbourhoods and serves as a reference point for prospective employers in ensuring that persons who have a history of sexual offences do not get employed because of the risk they pose to the public, especially to children and other vulnerable groups.’
If it gets the green light, the National Identification and Registration Authority (Nira) will run the rule over the sex offenders’ register. Ms Mastula Namatovu, the Kamuli Municipality lawmaker, says the Community Development Officers (CDOs) will have to pull their weight for the sex offender registry to see the light of day.
‘The CDOs, or probation officers, in all districts need to jot down whatever is happening. Even these offenses are so many. You find that because districts don’t have a way of getting this information from the villages. So, there is a lot that is needed,’ Ms Namatovu says.
Compensation proposal
Mr Ntenga says his office intends to push for the creation of a provision to ’empower court to award a victim of the [sexual] offence under the Penal Code Act.’ The legislative agenda offers more granular details.
It states that: “Apart from the payment of compensation to victims of defilement, there is currently no other provision which specifically grants victims of other sexual offences the right to receive compensation from the convicted person.’
“The provision will make it easy for victims of sexual violence to receive compensation from the convicted person since the award of compensation will be made in the same processes as the criminal trial, thereby eliminating the need to take out civil proceedings for recovery of compensation,” it adds.
There is also an appetite ‘to codify a practice and require that children who have defiled each other should be treated equally and should remove the current practice of prosecuting the male child in such situations’.
A gender-neutral approach has also been suggested to ensure that ‘the offence [of procuring a person for prostitution cannot] only be committed by a male person against a female person”. The provision, per Mr Tamale, ‘also needs to be harmonised with the offence of defilement and rape by restricting the offence to a person below 18 years of age”.
Other provisions
There is also a proposal to introduce the offence of indecent assault, defined as “an offence committed by a person who directly or indirectly, physically or online intentionally, exposes a person’s sexual organ, breasts or buttocks to any other person”.
Mr Tamale says “the offence is currently not prosecuted on its own right since it does not exist in the Penal Code Act yet vices that would fall under the offence of indecent exposure are common and not punished”.
The mooted draft laws also intend to criminalise the supply of pornographic material to children, prohibit the use of children in sex tourism and to also ‘obligate a person who knows about sexual offence to report the same to the authorities in order to protect the children and other vulnerable members of society’.
Mr Tamale shares that the draft laws also intend to criminalise sexual acts in the presence of children and also introduce the ‘offence of child grooming committed by a person who engages a child in non-sexual relationships that are intended to earn the trust of a child in order to engage the child in sex’.
‘We are going to introduce the offence around child grooming. We have seen that someone can bring up a child and befriend that child for purposes of engaging in sexual activities with that child. It is rampant. We think that it does not happen in Uganda, but it happens,’ he adds.
An amendment of the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act also intends to rework the definition of the term ‘exploitation’ to insert ‘engaging a child in forced begging.’
‘There is a group of people who bring these children from Karamoja [and put them on streets to beg] but those people cannot be charged because the element [of begging] that they push those children into is not punishable under the law,’ Mr Tamale says.
Ms Ann Nassamula, the senior programme officer at the Center for Domestic Violence Prevention (CeDoVip), however contends that ‘the real gap is enforcement; not absence of law’. To improve the state of affairs, she proposes that “better-resourced law enforcement and prosecutors for real accountability” be done across all concerned national structures.