Accra, Sept.01, GNA – The belittling of some reported cases of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence by police officials deters victims from reporting further abuses.
Professor Yaa Adobea Owusu, with the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Ghana (UG), who said this in a study her Department conducted, said the paying of little or no attention to such cases often reported to the Police in communities, deterred victims from reporting again, either through personal experience or that of others.
She said per the research, some police officials and legal personnel sometimes allegedly requested illegal payments from victims, a situation she described as “unhelpful” to fighting SGBVs.
Prof. Owusu said this at a Capacity Building workshop organised by the ProHumane Afrique International, FORD Foundation, and the Development Research and Projects Centre, Nigeria, in Accra on Wednesday.
She said other factors that made victims lose interest in reporting cases of SGBV were stigmatisation, the threat of divorce and divorce, fear of further abuse, societal blame, and inability to afford medical examination bills, inability to fund transportation to and from over the case, illiteracy and lack of social capital for legal redress.
Prof. Owusu said perpetrators of SGBV were mostly males between the ages of 15 and 35, while victims were mostly females of all ages, adding that perpetrators were often familiar to victims such as parents, siblings, cousins, uncles, teachers, religious leaders, grandparents, stepparents, foster parents/guardians, neighbours’, boyfriends, husbands, wives, and in-laws, etc.
Triggers of SGBV include issues over sexual relations, suspicion and accusation of sexual infidelity, issues over money, women with HIV and AIDS, childless women, and poor and vulnerable women, she said.
Prof. Owusu who is also with the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), UG, said 33 per cent of women in Ghana had ever experienced some form of Domestic Violence, and recent evidence suggested that 20 per cent of men and about 28 per cent of Ghanaian women had experienced physical, sexual, emotional or economic intimate partner violence.
Madam Sarah Adwoa Safo, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, in an address read on her behalf, said Gender-based violence was a violation of fundamental human rights that denied the victim’s human dignity and hampered national development.
The unequal power relations among men and women were one of the root causes of gender-based violence faced by the country and the continent as a whole, she said.
The Minister said her Ministry had developed several policies, laws, and strategies to protect women and girls to enable them to fully contribute their quota to national development.
Among these frameworks were a five-year Strategic Plan to address Adolescent Pregnancy in Ghana, a National Gender Policy and its Strategic Implementation Plan, National framework on ending Child Marriage and National Domestic Violence Policy and Plan of Action to implement the Domestic Violence Act, 2007 (Act 732).
Madam Safo said the Ministry had made interventions as part of efforts to adequately address gender-based violence and child marriage, through engagement with men and boys as advocates for gender equality, and the elimination of harmful cultural practices to aid the rescue of the girl child from early marriage.
GNA