What has made the teenager's trauma even worse is that her assailants are still free. “She can't understand why people keep coming to ask questions but those men don't get arrested,” said Rugene。

Three of those who raped Liz are pupils at schools near her own and police have had the names of all six attackers since 27 June. After stories appeared in local newspapers, officers were finally sent to arrest those still in school. Teachers at one of the schools asked if the arrests could be postponed to allow them to take part in exams. The request was granted and police claimed afterwards that they were “tricked” by the teachers, who helped the pupils go into hiding。

Mary Mahoka, a social worker with a local child protection organisation, said cases such as Liz's were the product of entrenched chauvinism in her home area of Busia, an impoverished county close to the shore of Lake Victoria。

Polygamy was widely practised and girls were not valued by the community, she said. When she first started to work with rape victims in 1998, she found that perpetrators would pay for their crime by handing over a goat or a bag of maize to the girl's parents。

Last week, Mahoka was helping a six-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted by a man in his 20s. “It's happening every day, but often it's not reported,” she said。

Mahoka, whose organisation is partly funded by UK aid, has to disguise the nature of her group's work, calling it “rural education and economic enhancement” so as not to provoke hostility among traditionalists in the community。

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