An international organisation, Global Rights, has advocated community participation in tackling sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in states across the federation.
Speaking Tuesday in Abuja, during a two-day training on promoting effective community referral pathways for SGBV response in Northwest Nigeria, Global Rights’ Program Officer, Women and Gender unit, Noya Sedi, said cases must be reported specifically to sexual assault referral centres (SARCs) for effective handling.
She said: “The project is really about linking community-based response systems to GBV and more formal structures, specifically the sexual assault referral centres (SARCs). What we’ve noticed is that in establishing our community dialogue committees, there’s a need to create a synergy between those informal systems and more formal structures.
“From time to time, survivors tend to turn to some of these informal systems and structures as first responders. There’s a need to create an integration of the system wherein the community members or the community dialogue committees, and the sexual assault referral centres have a straight referral pathway.
“This training is to strengthen that referral pathway and integrate that into the system. In turn, strengthening the response mechanism at the community level, specifically in the Northwest states, which are our focal states for this project.
“I wouldn’t say we’re not doing anything right. I would actually say that we are taking steps in the right direction. But that’s what they are, steps. So they might be slow steps. I might start to see little progress here and there, but it’s not something that happens overnight. The struggle is a continuous one.
“The community plays an important role in tackling gender-based violence because, like I said earlier, a lot of times these people are inadvertent first responders. They may not even intend to be, but these are the first people who tend to hear about these things
and tend to hear about these issues.
“So community members owe it to survivors, owe it to victims, owe it to other community members to ensure that it’s a safe environment for people, not just women, but also men, children, girls, boys, and also educate the public, sensitize people around them.
and also educate the public, sensitise people around them.
“That’s why we created the structure of the Community Dialogue Committee, which is made up of respectable citizens among the community members to be drivers of this change.”
Also speaking, the center manager Salama Sexual Assault Reference Center (SARC), Kafanchan, Zone 3, Kaduna state, Grace Yohanna Abbin, said Nigeria has a long way to go in tackling GBV because of the slowness of the judicial system, revealing the center has recorded 4,426 cases from Febuary 2019 to January 2025.
She said: “GBV is a global issue and it’s a game of power. He that has the power deals with the vulnerable, which is not so good, so it has to do with the violation of human rights. We still have a long way to go because people are beginning to speak up. I know it has been an issue.
“One bad thing about violence is that anybody can be violated. Gender-based violence has no respect for age, culture, religion, tribe, or what have you. It has no respect for even profession. So both men and women are affected. It’s not as if the men are not being abused. They are equally abused. They are also reported. But it’s worse on women and children.
“The SARC Centre in Kafanchan was opened since 2019. When we started, we recorded just two cases in a month and they were just female. Now we went in for awareness and sensitization. Before, you know, people were beginning to report. Now we have recorded 4,426 cases.
“We have eight local governments under Kafanchan. So in all the eight local governments, people come to report cases of gender-based violence. So we have recorded 4,426 cases in Kafanchan Zone 3 from Febuary 2019 to January 2025, out of which 3,000 plus were women.”