The ALERTs Study assessed pre-post knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) in slum communities. Across the study sites of Ki-Mombasa Bwaise and Kabalagala-Kataba, it emerged that men were being abused emotionally, denied consensual conjugal rights, subjected to ridicule infront of their children because of failure to provide basic needs at home, as shown below:  

 These women mistreat us much like my brother here has explained. When you go back home drunk while in reality you did not have any money, she thinks you had money and deliberately refused to give it to her while surely you did not have the money… The way they mistreat us, they deny us our conjugal rights giving excuses that they are hungry. You also wonder, “you also don’t eat, the little that is there is what you eat and service [sex] is needed”… It is very bad not to have sex because your mind will have been prepared, you can even get sick because they tell us that when the sperms have started their journey, they have to be ejected”                (FGD, Men Kataba)  

Denial of conjugal rights may result into issues like those mentioned in the above quote and will sometimes amount to cruelty which can be a ground for divorce. From the observations made during the focus group discussions with men, they reported dissatisfaction and shared how they suffer destruction of their self-worth. They mentioned that this emotional or psychological abuse is even worse because it can be difficult to notice it and the support providers cannot easily identify the victims unless they speak out.

Besides, the role reversals especially where the women were sex workers, whose work was not affected as much by the lockdown, meant that it is the women that bought the food in the house. In situations where the commercial sex worker was also a married woman, the men could not come to terms with the new status quo, and this resulted in daily fights. 

It is also evident that the male victims of violence suffered in silence, they did not report the violence since they are dependent on the perpetrators for survival.  Besides, some men also believed that they were deprived of their powers in a home by authorities that “empowered” women, making it difficult for them to report to the same authorities.  And most men that claimed to be the husbands of sex workers told us that they were initially clients who had gone to pay for a sex service and as a result it turned out to be a couple. According to a local leader, this type of couple begins a family from a brothel where a woman can easily allow in another client which erupts into conflict and thereby causing violence.