Local Family Tackles Child Sexual Assault in Uganda

DRIPPING SPRINGS — Uganda is a country located in Eastern Africa that is known for its gorgeous landscapes and unique wildlife. Uganda is also a country where one in three girls and one in six boys will endure sexual abuse, according to a national survey published by the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development.

The Uganda Violence Against Children Survey, published in August 2018, found that only about 50% of children who experienced sexual violence in childhood told someone about it.

“Reporting of violence may be infrequent as a result of corruption within response services, where service providers, such as police or health workers, demand payment in exchange for services. Survivors also may not report violence because there is often a stigma within Ugandan society, where survivors of sexual violence, such as forced sex or sex with a child, are considered tainted,” the survey stated.

Sarah and Scott Lambie, Dripping Springs residents, had been living in Uganda for seven years when they met Vanessa.

“Vanessa was 11 years old when she came to stay with us. We met her at city hall in Kampala, Uganda where we were working with CPS [Child Protective Services] to get a home study for an adoption of two other children and she was just there sitting on the floor,” said Scott. “The officer told us she had nowhere to go, so we decided that we would give her a home until they could find a family for her and they never did. We ended up adopting her.”

Vanessa was sexually abused at the age of 9 by her uncle. When reporting the attack to her grandmother was met with anger toward her, she told her father. The man who was meant to protect her took her uncle’s side, believing that her uncle did nothing wrong and was “preparing her” for marriage. Her father began abusing her months later.

“I went on and told a lot of people about what was going on, but no one offered to help. Everyone just expected you to just handle your business and stay quiet about it,” said Vanessa in a video detailing her story. “In my heart, I knew it was wrong. I knew it was not right.”

After experiencing abuse for over a year, she felt that she could “no longer stay quiet.” Vanessa decided to go to the police to report the ongoing abuse. This is where she met her future family.

“In 2020, we were all sitting at home and [Vanessa] came up to me and said that she wanted to tell her story of sexual abuse, in the hope that it would help other children in Uganda because [sexual assault] is not talked about at all,” said Scott. “I think the event [that inspired her] was when she was on a group call during lockdown with a bunch of kids from Uganda … When she was on [the call], she told her story to that group of people and when they hung up, a bunch of them sent her a message saying, 'This is happening to me, too, and I don’t know what to do.'”

After speaking to friends and family, the Lambie family was eventually connected to the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Texas, an organization that fights child sexual assault, where they were taught how to create and run a program like theirs in Uganda. The effort and programs to help children of sexual assault in Uganda became Rescue One More, the Lambie’s nonprofit.

Rescue One More utilizes existing partners in Uganda that have built relationships with local police, social workers, counselors and governmental officials to create a shelter for victims of child sexual abuse.

“Those are kind of the core of the team that come together and go through a process of forming their protocols, processes and knowing exactly where a child is in the [rescuing] system. This way, the child doesn’t have to go to multiple places and tell their story over and over again,” Scott said. “Our focus is on the safety, the justice and the healing of the child.”

The organization also provides transportation to assist police officers in making arrests due to the lack of mobility in the area.

Just as Vanessa experienced dismissal from those around her, many other children do as well, explained Scott.

“Culturally, it’s not highly accepted that a child speaks out about any adult misbehavior. There’s a significant amount of respect for elders in the community, so children are very reluctant to come forward. So we have to go out into the community, into the schools and make the children aware that there is a resource for them,” he said. “[Once] the children see that, ‘Okay, if I report this problem, I’m actually going to get to a safe place and actually going to see the person arrested. Things are going to work out for me,’ the children are kind of empowered to report the people abusing them.”

In the last two years, the teams that have been created at four shelters have helped more than 100 children who have experienced sexual assault, made 62 arrests and have succeeded in two guilty convictions.

“The two convictions that we’ve had so far, both guilty verdicts, are very challenging to get [in Uganda] because, most of the time, evidence for cases like this is not done with any sort of expertise. We’ve been able to implement that pretty well, to the point where the evidence has been collected properly and then was able to be compiled and filed, so we’re expecting a lot more,” Scott said.

The Lambie family hopes that in the future Rescue One More will expand into all 135 districts of Uganda and spread to other countries which are experiencing rampant child sexual abuse.

“One of our hopes is that another organization will come along and say ‘Okay, this is working in Uganda we’d like to take it to Kenya, Rwanda or Zimbabwe,’ and we can bring them to Uganda and teach them how to do it,” he said. “It’s going to take an army to fight this battle … We believe we can implement this in any developing country in the world.”

For more information, visit www.rescueonemore.com.