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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:31 am
Time: 12:31 am
Results for domestic violence (africa)
1 results foundAuthor: Ajayi, Titilope Title: State Responses to Women’s Security Challenges: An Assessment of Ghana’s Domestic Violence Victim Support Unit – Lessons for Nigeria Summary: Violence against women (VAW) is violence that is committed against women because they are women. It affects an estimated 1 in every 3 women worldwide (United Nations, 2006), depriving them of ‘their ability to achieve their full potential by threatening their safety, freedom and autonomy’. VAW has important health, social, and economic consequences for survivors, their families, and the communities and countries where they live (World Health Organisation, 2009). In the face of high levels of VAW and sexual victimization in Nigeria, much of it perpetrated with impunity by security officials, the blatant dearth of state-sponsored support services has contributed to low levels of reporting and unequal access to justice. Civil society has advocated actively against this and provided support in the form of counselling, shelters, hotlines, training and other activities intended to enhance police capacity to handle VAW. The impact that has been made, such as the creation of a gender violence desk in the Ilupeju police station in Lagos, Nigeria, is limited due to a lack of resources and inadequate government support. For this reason, there is a need for more targeted and coordinated interventions within the framework of national level policy support that would be best provided by a national domestic violence (DV) bill that has been pending since 2003. Gender desks exist in some police stations in Nigeria. Yet uneven knowledge of their status and mandate, even among police personnel, calls into question their effectiveness and relevance. This disparity, juxtaposed with UNIFEM’s praise for the desks as a useful tool for addressing VAW, indicates that the issue needs to be revisited and leads this paper to recommend the reorientation and reintroduction, as appropriate, of VAW units within the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and set out guidelines for this project. Women’s police stations and units created within police stations to handle VAW are relatively recent and increasingly popular international phenomena recommended by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) as appropriate and effective tools for combating VAW. In Africa, these units currently exist in Namibia (1993), South Africa (1995), Sierra Leone (2001), Lesotho (2003), Liberia (2005), and Tanzania (2008) with mandates to eradicate gender based violence (GBV), including against children, regardless of where it occurs. Established in 1998, the Domestic Violence Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) is one of a few in Africa set up exclusively to handle cases of VAW. Although it is not perfect and this approach is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution to the scourge of VAW, there are important lessons to be learned from DOVVSU’s experiences. In light of prevailing high rates of VAW in Nigeria, and as a complement to ongoing police reform efforts there, there is a strong case for establishing a similar unit within the NPF. This report distils these lessons in an effort to assist the NPF in tackling Nigerian women’s security challenges in a more coherent and lasting manner. Section two discusses some common ‘causes’ of VAW while section three outlines the general context of security in the countries under study. Sections four and five examine state and non-state responses to VAW in both countries with a focus on what has driven and sustained the DOVVSU in Ghana. A final section sets out guidelines for improving the NPF’s response to VAW based on lessons from Ghana. Details: Santiago de Chile: The Global Consortium on Security Transformation (GCST), 2011. 27p. Source: Internet Resource: New Voices Series, No. 11: Accessed April 4, 2011 at: http://www.securitytransformation.org/images/publicaciones/200_New_Voices_Series_11_-_State_Responses_to_Womens_Security_Challenges.pdf Year: 2011 Country: Africa URL: http://www.securitytransformation.org/images/publicaciones/200_New_Voices_Series_11_-_State_Responses_to_Womens_Security_Challenges.pdf Shelf Number: 121240 Keywords: Domestic Violence (Africa)Intimate Partner ViolencePolice and Domestic ViolenceRapeSexual AssaultVictims of Domestic Violence, Services forViolence Against Women |