Figure 1The woman says the family of the man accused of raping her came to her home three times asking her not to pursue the case. The Ministry of Justice says it lacks the resources to reach her.
Summary:
- A 57-year-old grandmother in Todee District says she was raped in January. Seven months later, her case has not been heard, no government official has visited her, and the family of the accused has approached her with money and gifts, asking her to drop the case.
- The head of the SGBV unit at the Ministry of Justice concedes a lack of funds has meant his office has secured just two convictions in six years.
- The vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia calls the failure to deliver justice for victims “a national emergency.”
By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives
TODEE DISTRICT, Montserrado County — The first time they came, they brought L$18,000 (US$100). The second time the family brought a lapa, a traditional cloth.
When the family, whose 24-year-old son had been accused by multiple witnesses of raping the 57-year-old grandmother in broad daylight in front of her small grandson, arrived with the cloth, the woman says she understood exactly what it meant.
“The boy ma bring the lapa; That the cloth her son take from on me,” she said in Liberian English. “That the cloth she come put back on me.”
She understood what the money was for too. “They are begging so I can agree so they can free their son.”
Most victims in Liberia eventually accept the money. Though the grandmother says she badly wants justice, she is beginning to think she has no choice but to do the same.
The woman’s quest for justice, documented by FrontPage Africa/New Narratives since January when she and witnesses say the crime took place, has shown the extraordinary obstacles that any victim of sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia must overcome, particularly those from rural areas. She and her community have had to raise hundreds of dollars – including to transport and detain the accused. The case was delayed when the case files, in the paper-based system, were lost. Finally the case has stalled because neither the woman nor the court have the funds to bring her to the courtroom in Monrovia.
The case has been a window into the dysfunctional justice system which has seen just two convictions in six years, says Isaac George, head of the Sexual and Gender Based Violence unit at the Ministry of Justice.
George said his unit has about 300 reported cases on his books right now. The unit has no functional forensic DNA laboratory to test semen samples and no vehicle for field visits. The only evidence they have in most rape cases rests largely on physical examinations at One Stop rape centers, which defense lawyers routinely challenge in court as opinion rather than scientific proof.
After the grandmother’s case made national news, George spoke to her by phone and told her she would have to find someone to bring her to Monrovia.
“We do not have the means of going to Todee,” George said. “We do not have the means of shuttling from here to Todee and back. No. I blame the system. It is a systemic problem within our justice sector.”
And now, with two terms of court gone, the accused rapist, a 24-year-old identified in court records as Mohammed Bah, is eligible for bail because his case has not been heard in a timely manner. Like an 8-year-old victim whose case New Narratives exposed in February, the grandmother may soon have to live with the alleged perpetrator back in her community.
“If she doesn’t show up after two terms of court, we have no choice but to release him,” George said. “That is it.”
Youth march in March demanding stronger action on rape and other gender-based violence. Credit: Joyclyn Wea/New Narratives
“Women are no longer safe,” said Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia. She said the pattern in this case has become routine. And defense lawyers are now learning to game the system.
“It is a new form — the defense moving in and saying failure to proceed — and then you see rape suspects walking freely and going back and committing more rape,” Taylor Kelly said. “And then we still have this perpetual cycle of SGBV going on because people see that they are not being dealt with within the full extent of the law.”
“This should not be happening in a civilized society. It has become a national emergency,” says Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia.
$22 Million EU-Funded Spotlight Project Fails to Deliver Justice
Many experts hoped things would have been better by now. The European Union’s Spotlight Initiative arrived in Liberia in 2017 as part of a 5-year $22 million partnership with the United Nations, promising to help women and girls live free from violence. (It was part of a bigger project in 8 countries in Africa). It could point to real breakthroughs: traditional leaders signed an unprecedented statement in 2019 banning female genital mutilation and closing the “bush schools” where the practice is carried out, and the country built new systems to track gender-based violence cases. But a 2023 audit by the European Court of Auditors found that the promise on paper rarely reached the women it was meant to protect. Because no law actually criminalized FGM, victims still struggled to access justice, and auditors who visited the country were told the practice continued in the very counties that had signed up to the ban. The Domestic Violence Act, approved in 2019, remained hobbled by practical and cultural obstacles — and the initiative had no way of monitoring whether any of these laws were being enforced at all.
President George Weah declared rape a national emergency in 2021 and pledged $1.7 m to the effort after a three-day protest in Monrovia, © RFI/Darlington Porkpa
For rural women, the gap between commitment and protection is starkest in the justice system itself. The audit found that reported cases of violence against women in Liberia fell, rather than rose, over the life of the program — from a baseline of 2,105 down to 920 — a drop that auditors said signaled the difficulty of reaching and being believed by an under-resourced system, where police and court records are often too incomplete to even classify a complaint as gender-based violence.
Attitudes appeared to harden: Liberia was one of only two African countries where the share of people who believed a man was justified in beating his wife worsened over the period measured. And with the four-year program judged far too short to shift entrenched social norms — surveyed EU officials estimated real change takes around sixteen years — much of the work risked unravelling once the money was gone, since most of the activities auditors examined in Liberia were found unlikely to be sustainable.
New Narratives’ reporting shows that the auditors warnings have come true.
A new $13 million “Spotlight 2.0.” kicked off in 2025 and runs until 2029. A Gender-Based Violence Information Management System is planned that is supposed to strengthen how cases are recorded and shared across the system. The system is meant to function as a secure national database: when a survivor reports abuse at a clinic, police station, one-stop center, or safe home, trained staff enter basic case details and the services provided, helping the government see where cases cluster, where services are missing, and whether survivors are being followed up. It is intended to improve coordination, services, and data systems with the Ministry of Gender in a central role.
Activists say the case should be a wakeup call to the government to accelerate that work. Taylor Kelly says said the SGBV unit must receive the vehicles, equipment, and budget to reach survivors where they are. She said community-level legal aid and referral systems must exist so a woman in Todee does not have to navigate a city she has never visited to access justice.
“The state cannot take a responsibility and just put it on one group of people. You will have to lead,” she said.
“Let us go to court“
After three visits from the family, the grandmother is still holding out. She knows what the money and gifts buy: her silence, his freedom, the end of a case that has already cost her more than anyone has acknowledged.
She knows her photograph went on social media after the rape. She knows what her community saw. She knows what they said about her. When the family came with their apologies and their cloth and their money, she felt all of it at once — the violation, the public humiliation, and now the quiet pressure to make it disappear.
“All that I passed through,” she said. “My picture go all on Facebook. You supposed to know that your son bring big disgrace on me. All that one — his family coming to beg.”
She still holds a belief, after months of silence from the state, that what happened to her should be said out loud in a room where people have to listen.
“Let us go to court,” she says. “Let us talk the thing that happened to me so people can understand.”
This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.
