SAN FRANCISCO, August 05, (THEWILL) – With the COVID-19 pandemic biting hard, forcing countries to adopt certain measures to contain the spread including enforcing restrictions on movement of people, these measures have inadvertently caused unprecedented social challenges, among which is the surge in the cases of sexual and gender based violence.
A recent report from the Ministry of Women Affairs revealed that Nigeria has witnessed at least 3600 rape cases during this lockdown, up 300% prior to the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic.
Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) has been attracting more conversations with many calling on the government to declare a state of emergency on SGBV.
Nigeria as a country has witnessed a prevalence of sexual and gender based violence where many women and girls are being raped, molested, and even killed during the lockdown. This worrying phenomenon has been attributed to the growing rape culture in the country says, Ndi Kato, the CEO of Dinidari Foundation during a recent breakfast meeting organized by Youthhub Africa to discuss “The impact of Covid-19 on SGBV”.
Ndi Kato in her submission lamented that despite the various efforts being made, Nigeria still remains one of the countries with high prevalence of SGBV.
She highlighted the various steps the National Human Right Commission in collaboration with other stakeholders have taken to increase responses through ‘social engineering’. The social engineering according to her is a policy initiative of NHRC to strengthen collaboration in the fight against SGBV.
“It is expected that through this social engineering strategy, all the stakeholders working to end SGBV will be brought under one roof as the agency is working to establish a situation room which is targeting members of Civil Society Groups, Security Agencies, Journalists, Community and Religious Leaders and all those who are involved in fighting sexual and gender based violence.
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“There are also plans to have in place data gathering app as a backdrop for the activities and discussions in the situations rooms, where cases, responses are going to be recorded”, this Kato said can be used for surveys to track the progress and make informed decisions for policy formulations and implementation in the fight against GBV.
Speaking on the challenges militating against SGBV responses, Ndi Kato said one of the challenges is lack of commitments by the government, journalists and other stakeholder to prioritize human rights issues. She bemoaned situations where journalists demand for financial gratifications to report these issues. She also pointed out that lack of national spread, human capacity and shortage of funds are some of the factors derailing the fight.
Dorothy Njamanze, the CEO of Dorothy Njamanze Foundation whose organization provides first response services to victims of SGBV as a “Survival run Organisation” suggested that human right issues especially sexual and gender based violence should be declared emergency and essential service.
This according to her is as a result of her experiences during this lockdown, where security personnel on duties have intercepted the staff of the foundation during their response operations. She also decried situation where some community leaders would wade into a rape or sexual abuse cases to free the perpetrators thereby denying the victims justice.
Ms. Njamanze seeks the establishment of inter-ministerial and inter-agencies collaboration to end SGBV.
Part of the services rendered by Dorothy Njamanze foundation include, taking up cases in courts for victims, advocacy and awareness creation, getting medical help for victims among others. According to Njamanze, through the advocacy and awareness drive, they train people at community levels on proper labeling and emotions management, where victims are made to accept their situations and adopt better emotional attitude to survive the trauma.
Earlier on the representative of UN Women, Mr Safiu Umar enjoined the participant to be committed to end the scourge of SGBV, noting that UN Women is working assiduously to strengthen advocacy and further strengthen collaborations. He also pointed out that lack of adequate statistics and availability of data are some of the major issues affecting the fight against SGBV, these he said UN Women is also making efforts to address.
Recently, the Inspector General of Police had called on Nigerians to join in efforts to tackle rape and other sexual violence by ensuring prompt report of cases and working with the police to apprehend the suspects.
“I will call on every Nigerian that comes across any victim of sexual offences, rape or gender-based violence to quickly report to law enforcement agents because keeping quiet without reporting it will give room for the perpetrators to continue to commit the offences,” he said.
He suggested that the movement restrictions put in place because of COVID-19 may have contributed to the increase in reported rape cases across Nigeria.
“It has come to the public knowledge now that because of the COVID-19 restrictions, we have a surge in cases of rape and gender-based violence. These are cases that are now coming up but we want to let members of the public know that, rape and gender-based violence has been there.
“The law enforcement agents have been dealing with these cases, in most cases, members of the public are not aware of the actions that the law enforcement agents have been taking.
“The police and other security agencies and other Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been collaborating, to see to it that these cases of rape and gender-based violence are dealt with.
“The NGOs and Civil Society Organisations that have the capacity to deal with this kind of offenses have been cooperating with law enforcement agencies in capacity building, management of victims of rape and similar offenses and procedures for collecting evidence, towards successful prosecution. The government has taken the matter to another level now because of the scourge we have noticed.” he said.
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