By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Gender-based violence takes many forms.
It includes domestic violence, sexual abuse and harassment, rape, incest,
trafficking in women, forced prostitution, trafficking in girls, child marriage
and harmful practices. These forms of violence can result in physical, sexual,
mental, reproductive health and other health problems.
Amidst the current security challenges
that we confront as a country, the patterns of gender-based violence have also
ramified into realms that were until recently unthinkable.
In the territories
of Nigeria under the insurgency, young women are routinely abducted into sexual
slavery or forced marriage; precluded from going to school; and now
increasingly recruited as mules or carriers of improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) or into suicide operations.
This launch of the Guidelines,
for instance, takes place 302 days after the abduction of the Chibok Girls.
In this election season, many
politicians will procure young people, ply them with psychotropic substances,
arm them with the most dangerous weapons possible and parlay them into election
violence. All persons who find election violence abhorrent must rise in unison
against gender-based violence. The former is a form of the latter.
In the next few days, the National
Human Rights Commission, whose Governing Council I currently chair, will be
issuing a report and advisory on election-related violence in Nigeria ahead of
the 2015 general elections.
These forms of violence can result in
physical, sexual, mental, reproductive health and other health problems that
can kill, damage young persons for life or condemn them to lives of destitution
and chronic debility. The violations or consequences of gender-based violence
often leave their victims struggling with profound indignity.
For these reasons, Gender-Based
Violence (GBV) against young persons is a human rights violation, a public
health crisis, and an obstacle to equality, development, security and peace.
This should be self-evident. To many people who should know better, however, it
isn’t.
The question may be asked: why do we
need a manual or set of Guidelines on Gender-Based Violence and Young
Persons in Nigeria? The answer is fairly straight-forward: we’re abysmal in
addressing gender-based violence, especially when it affects young people.
Evidence of this abounds everywhere. Reporting of gender-based violence is
poor.
When children or young persons report
it, we prefer to live in denial or not to believe them. The standard African
wisdom that it takes a village to raise a child seems to break down at its
point of contact with the reality of gender-based violence.
Grooming and sexual exploitation of
young persons by persons in whose care they have been committed is not uncommon.
Other forms of physical coercion and violence are often regarded or excused as
character forming by people who should know better.
Violence against young persons,
including girls, is both intrusive and pervasive. It is also a crime for which
there is almost always no prosecution or accountability. Those who do it know
they will get away with it because society is indifferent to or tolerates it.
Our law enforcement and other public
institutions are not equipped with the skills, material and emotional resources
to respond to reports or complaints of gender-based violence against young
persons. The family and schools, which together should nurture and protect
children and young persons, are both major site of such violence.
The Police claims it is poorly funded.
The standard response that it offers to reports of gender-based violence in the
family is to outsource if back to the family from where it came. Quite often,
this happens despite clear evidence that the family itself is or has been both
predatory and indifferent.
Social welfare departments hardly
exist. Where they do, they are poorly staffed and resourced and struggle for
attention to anything but the subsistence of their staff.
At the National Human Rights
Commission, GBV affecting young women in particular constitutes possibly the
largest class of human rights violations that we deal with on a daily basis.
The young girls and women affected suffer double jeopardy: they are violated
because of they are female; and they are denied access to remedies because they
have been violated.
Our standard response to the various
forms of violence that young persons may experience in our society is denial,
indifference or incapacity. These Guidelines are designed to deny would
be Pontius Pilates of any alibis or excuses.
That is why it is important that we all
invest in the effective dissemination of these Guidelines. It would be
no use if, like many other publications of this nature, these Guidelines
end up being advertised on our shelves as monuments to projects that have been
completed for the benefit of foreign funders.
The lives destroyed by gender-based
violence are the lives of our children; the future being destroyed is the
future of our race. If we follow up this launch with self-congratulations and
do nothing with these Guidelines, we’ll be failing the victims and
survivors for whom, ultimately, these Guidelines should bring succour.
Dr. Odinkalu read this keynote remarks
to the launch of Guidelines on Gender-Based Violence & Young Persons in
Nigeria, Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, 10 February 2015.
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