I was car-jacked and raped in my home city of Nairobi in 2002.
When I tried to report it, the police called my experience a robbery and ignored my rape.
In 2005 I set up the Wangu Kanja Foundation to help other women who have faced similar sexual violence get justice. I spent a week in London this September promoting the foundation's work with the charity ActionAid, who help fund and run some of our projects empowering women. I gave several media interviews, retelling my story over and over. I'm sure that afterwards some of those journalists imagined that to me, men are the enemy.
That is far from my truth.
At my foundation, we are just about to launch an ambitious text-message service allowing the millions of Kenyan women who face gender-based violence to report it in confidence to police officers and paralegals the we are training up right now - some of whom are men who have signed themselves up to this cause. It is hard for me to convey just how much of a game-changer this is. Kenya is a highly patriarchal place; sexual violence is excused by much of our society and reporting of gender-based violence is low. The standing of the police among Kenyan women is abysmal, because they do not take reports of gender-based violence seriously. And this follows cases where some police officers themselves raped women in the 2007-2008 post-election violence that swept my country.
But we need to act as a society to stop this.
That's why my foundation has welcomed men into our work and we appreciate those men who stand with us. Women will always be in the driving seat at my foundation, but now there will be male police officers in police stations, trained by us - including by women who have experienced gender-based violence - to respond appropriately to a woman traumatised by such an attack. When she turns up to report it, these men will demonstrate that Kenyan society now wants them to access justice.
I will give you two examples of men joining our fight.
Alex Otieno is 24 and a volunteer community health worker with my foundation in Nairobi's Mukuru slum, where he was born, raised and lives with his wife and brothers. He was working to link people with HIV to appropriate centres for help when I met him. I asked him to work with us in identifying and counselling survivors of rape. He puts survivors in touch with one another and he handles cases I work on while I am away. Alex has earned not only my trust, but the trust and support of the Mukuru community in his work, so much so that he can receive a phone-call at any hour of the day or night from a woman in need who knows he will help. Alex has worked to improve acceptance for those speaking out and to persuade community leaders and chiefs (usually men) to recognise, talk about, challenge it and bring about justice for women - not sweep it under the carpet. Alex is supportive of the text message service we are launching and of men being trained up to help operate it, because he thinks it will lessen women's' dependence on their husbands when they have experience violence and want to report it. The service will allow women to report attacks in confidence, and those texts will in some cases go to Alex.
My colleague John Limo is an inspector in the police station next door to our foundation's office in Mukuru. John and his officers work closely with us and they are already leading big changes in what happens when a woman reports gender-based violence. They take an initial report and will escort the woman to Nairobi Women's hospital. They go on to investigate the complaint and if they find the suspect, they now take DNA samples from both the suspect and the woman, to see if they can establish the facts in order for a case to be put together. Reports of gender-based violence at his station, John tells me, have recently spiked - rape and sodomy in particular. We don't know yet if that's because more women are reporting crimes because they know the officers in this particular place will help or because more crimes are being committed.
Alex and John are just two of the men who have joined me in standing up to the problem of violence against women and girls in a society that has condoned it. They have joined my work to show Kenyans that they are willing to help bring violence to an end, just as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), under the auspices of the United Nations, aim to do globally. And it's precisely this grassroots work that will make the SDGs work.
Many countries made fighting gender-based violence a priority in the recent United Nations' General Assembly (UNGA), in which the new SDGs were agreed - and one on ending violence against women and girls. But I was sorely disappointed that UK prime minister David Cameron did not attend the meeting and was not there to show that his country is at the forefront of that fight - especially as I saw and heard of so much public support for it while I was in London in September. ActionAid delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street that month containing over 60,000 signatures, demanding that David Cameron attend the UNGA and support SDG5 committing signatory countries to ending violence against women and girls.
The British people clearly want their government to stand up for this cause. After all, a man in a position to influence global policy such as David Cameron has a responsibility to act. The UK taking a lead on this would have sent a clear message to other countries such as Kenya that the tide is turning on gender-based violence and on women suffering this in silence.
If Alex and John could have met David Cameron, they would have urged him to attend the UNGA and sign up to SDG because these actions are what bring global attention, funding and government support to projects like ours.
Wangu Kanja is a rape survivor and founder of the Wangu Kanja Foundation. She is an ambassador for ActionAid UK's #Fearless campaign.
Follow Wangu Kanja on Twitter at @KanjaWangu