By Prince Acquah
Cape Coast, Feb. 08, GNA – The Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (Gender Centre) has advocated for the retooling of Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service to carry out its mandate effectively.
It said the Government and the Ministry of the Interior must adequately fund the unit and sufficiently arm it with logistics to mitigate the incidence of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) which continued to wreak havoc, particularly on women and children.
Madam Dorcas Coker-Appiah, the Executive Director of the Centre, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), bemoaned the apparent lack of political will on the part of successive governments on GBV, and said the DOVVSU’s lack of resources was a setback for the fight against GBV.
She maintained that violence against women was a social justice issue which needed all actors to work collaboratively to end it.
“The activism is not the work of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) alone, but it is also the work of everybody in the country.
“Government, CSOs, individuals, parents, guardians, traditional leaders and every other person has a role to play in preventing the violence,” she noted.
Madam Coker-Appiah insisted that government must be held accountable to implement the Domestic Violence Act and all other related international instruments to the latter.
“The government, having signed and ratified all these international instruments and also passing laws in this country about domestic prevention should put money into resourcing the organisations that have to prevent it,” she stated.
She was worried, for instance, that the Domestic Violence Fund, after it was established more than a decade ago with a seed money of GH¢50,000, had since not received any contribution to make it functional.
“So, what is the point of setting this fund with inadequate resources to support the intended victims?
“Even the procedure for accessing the fund is tedious. Of the GH¢50,000, there is still GH¢20,000 in the fund and nobody can access it because the funds are in Accra.
“If someone in the North or from some rural community needs it, how do they get access. The Ministry of Gender does not have offices everywhere so how does one access those funds?,” she queried.
The Executive Director observed that many victims of GBV were not voicing out because they had been made to believe that violence against women was a private family matter.
But she denounced the notion and intimated that reporting perpetrators was the only way to ensure that they did not get away with their bad actions.
“There are issues with the way the police and DOVVSU sometimes respond to issues of abuse but that is something that can be addressed over time. But the point is that if people do not report, then DOVVSU cannot do the work they are mandated to do,” Madam Coker-Appiah, said.
GNA