Students’ Role in Managing Gender-Based Violence in Kenyan Universities

Abstract

Gender-based violence (GBV) consists of physical acts of force, social and psychological harm meted to an individual or group of individuals for no other reason than that they are male or female. The review of literature provides evidence that the GBV exists hence the objective of this paper, is to assess the role students play in helping to eliminate GBV at universities for greater development of potentialities. The variables that were studied include: Sexual exploitation and harassment; derogatory language; discrimination and class; non-responsive learning environment; stereotypes and negative indoctrination (National Commission on Gender and Development, 2006). This paper was based on a study conducted in three public and three private universities. The study population consisted of the male and female students. The researcher used a sample size of 335 public and 327 private university students from a population of 151,600 and 47,912 respectively (Education Insight, 2010; Republic of Kenya 2010). Simple random sampling was used to choose public and private universities from their clusters based on a minimum of 10% of the population size for small samples (Salkind, 2004).To avoid class interruptions, convenience sampling was be used to obtain students who were free from class at the time of data collection to participate. Questionnaires were filled, collected and analyzed using PASW (formerly SPSS) to obtain means, percentages, standard deviations in this paper.

Keywords:Violence,Gender,Derogatory,Discrimination,Indoctrination,Streotyping.