There’s been an online uproar after Rwandan National Police spokesperson ACP Rutikanga Boniface announced on public television that public indecency will be punished. On August 29, police officers threatened to beat young women attending a concert by Tanzanian singer Diamond Platnumz if they did not follow the new ‘decency’ orders.
In Rubavu, a town in the west of the country, a young woman was seen on video being apprehended by police over the length of her dress. Thereafter, several government workers using the X platform stated that it is important for Rwandan culture to be upheld and that the ‘Western ways’ used to sexualize women’s bodies through revealing clothing are corrupting the youth. These are not isolated incidents.
Women’s bodies and the rights of gender-expansive and marginalized people have increasingly become battlegrounds for Christian fundamentalist moralists and lobbyists.
Rwandan law does not clearly define indecency. Article 143 of Law N° 68/2018 states: “Any person who performs an indecent act in public commits an offence.” Conviction can lead to imprisonment for six months to two years. In 2023, there were discussions about redefining indecency as “showing one’s private parts or performing sexual acts in public,” but this was not adopted. Ambiguity remains over what constitutes a ‘private part,’ making enforcement unclear and subjective. This also opens the door to bias against women and girls, as body parts like shoulders or cleavage may be deemed indecent, similar to theocratic states treating exposed hair as indecent.
Social media is flooded with calls for clarity on the law, as its guidelines would be replicated at entrances to businesses, hotels, and restaurants. This demonstrates how legal ambiguity fuels public scrutiny and the policing of women and girls. Women are speaking up about how legal definitions of decency affect their lives. We cannot live in a world where a mere body can incriminate a person, or where enforcers arbitrarily decide what clothing is inappropriate.
This debate is feeding into an already pervasive culture of gender-based violence whose victims are disproportionately women, girls and gender expansive people. Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), already common, is being fueled on TikTok and Instagram, where several young men and some journalists are justifying rape as the woman or girl’s fault due to what she is wearing.
On September 2, a young woman in Kibagabaga was harassed, beaten, undressed, and insulted by a group of men. The video has circulated on social media, but the perpetrators remain unpunished, and the girl’s fate is unknown. Now, online platforms—driven by manosphere communities and technocapitalists profiting from dehumanization—have become battlegrounds for controlling women’s public and private lives.
Mob violence and GBV have been normalized as of late, and public institutions have remained silent. Rwandan women and girls feel ignored, helpless, and abandoned.
The Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion, whose mandate is to champion gender equality, has in the past implicitly responded to rising rates of teenage pregnancies by blaming parents and mothers for failing to raise ‘decent’ girls. Once again, the risk in this rhetoric is that women, girls, and gender-expansive people become blamed for such deeply rooted systems of inequality and oppression. Subjective matters such as manners, morals, hemline lengths, and even treating nudity as indecency are regressions rooted in colonial and religious control of African bodies.
Counting Women, Not Counting on Rights
All this is happening while women hold 64 percent of seats in parliament, yet they are not fighting against the resurgent social control of women’s bodies or the legal silences that enable it. Rwanda has had a parliamentary women’s majority for nearly two decades, yet this has not resulted in real change, as patriarchal control of women’s lives continues to resurface.
On August 7, 2022, police arrested 24-year-old Liliane Mugabekazi after a photo of her at a concert taken by a journalist circulated online. She was charged with public indecency under Article 143 and faced imprisonment. Prosecutors claimed her clothing “revealed her private parts”—her breasts. A Kicukiro Primary Court judge initially denied her bail. Mugabekazi pleaded not guilty, noting she did not take or share the photo and had passed venue security. She was later acquitted. This public hounding and legal persecution for clothing choices is now resurgent, as efforts to police women’s bodies intensify.
Violence Against Women Is Never Just Domestic
These pushbacks against women’s rights—often justified as protecting ‘culture’ or fighting ‘westernization’—are not new, nor unique to Rwanda. Leading anti-rights groups like Christian Council International and Family Watch International’s hold on predominantly Christian African countries is manifesting as this push towards the legalization of Christian values and morals. We are witnessing a rapid merging of state and church, disguised as African culture.
This may be the African Charter of Family, Sovereignty and Values, conceptualized by Family Watch International and introduced to African parliamentarians in sessions held in Entebbe, Uganda, in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and in Accra, Ghana in 2026, with members of parliament from approximately 28 African countries. In true lobbying style, the organization has enmeshed African culture with colonial and religious culture – presenting it as the same thing- to save the morals and values of African societies. A white supremacist and imperialist’s agenda at work, championing ‘family values’, family ideas rooted in colonial capitalist entrapment, passing off as the benevolent custodians and reinstators of order. Even if they are working from behind the scenes and in meeting rooms with members of parliament, the lobbying conservative groups have proven to regress gender equality and inclusion gains that African countries had registered.
In 2023, Rwanda hosted Katalin Novák — then president of Hungary, now former — at the Women Deliver Conference in Kigali, giving her an opening-panel slot before more than 7,000 women’s rights advocates gathered for the first African edition of the event. The venue did the work: a figure with a documented anti-rights record was handed the stage at a women’s human rights conference, and the platform lent her the legitimacy in a space her politics could not get past the door. Novák used it to urge women to have as many children as they wish and to allude to nations “disappearing” through low birthrates. Immediately before assuming the presidency, she had led the Political Network for Values, one of the leading global platforms working to block rights for sexual minorities, defund contraception access, undermine evidence-based abortion laws, and elevate freedom of religion above competing rights such as health and non-discrimination.
Despite objections to her record, she was invited, hosted and went on to sign several agreements with President Paul Kagame. Novák resigned in February 2024 after pardoning a man convicted as an accomplice in covering up sexual abuse at a state children’s home. This scandal sat awkwardly against the “family values” platform she had built her career on. But her invitation raised concerns about the direction for gender equality in a country known as a champion of women’s rights. At the same time, actors like Family Watch International, the US organization the Southern Poverty Law Centre designates a hate group and whose leadership African rights coalitions have accused of exporting and financing homophobia across the continent, have been active across the Great Lakes region and working closely with those at the top of power, among others, First Ladies’ offices.
These groups are gaining ground as funding for human rights, gender equality, and inclusion declines amid the global economic crisis. Under Trump, the US shut down USAID—which provided 40% of development aid—and shifted to funding through ‘faith organizations.’ EU funding has also dried up, leaving little for bilateral equality programs. The ensuing scramble for African critical minerals has collapsed old funding models, and African governments lack the resources to fill the gap. As a result, conservative actors are filling the void, with many African countries desperate for funds to keep public institutions running. In times of scarcity, fundamentalist funding is an easy option, as it does not create massive national debt like World Bank loans.
The economic vulnerabilities are real: high unemployment, poverty, hunger, depreciating local currencies, high fuel costs, high inflation, a small formal private sector and tax base, and limited public service funding. These pressures are also pushing the continent to roll out the carpet for new funders whose targets have historically been the most marginalized. A disconnected continent, with trade deficits and low levels of manufacturing in the wake of the war on Iran hiking fuel prices, leaves many countries fragile and fertile ground for regressive forces. In this environment, women, girls and gender expansive persons become an easy target and distraction for dominant power.
The policing of women’s bodies in Rwanda cannot be read through narrow national lenses. We must look inward to lift the voices of women activists supporting survivors and calling for accountability, while also watching how these fragile moments open the door or are an extension of transnational anti-rights forces. Rwandan women continue to be stuck between a hard place and a rock, with an ambiguous law, rising levels of GBV due to the normalizing of violence against them stemming from policing of dress and yet holding the parliament majority seats.
Mbabazi* is a Rwandan researcher.