Introduction
Every year, the
world commemorates the global campaign to end gender based violence across the
globe during the 16 days of Activism. This global action against gender based
violence uses the 16 days starting from November 25th (International
Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls) to December 10th
(International Human Rights Day) to highlight the plight of women and girls
facing various forms of gender based violence (GBV) within a broad framework of
human rights violations and the need for all actors to scale up efforts to end
all forms of human rights abuses.
The 2017 theme: Leave No One Behind: End Violence
against Women and Girls is a reminder on the need to include those often
neglected in our collective efforts to end GBV. Conflicts, security challenges
and subsequent displacements have all brought new forms of violence against
women and girls; with the peculiarity of their situation serving as potential
grounds for neglect while focusing on meeting their urgent and basic
humanitarian needs for food, clean water and shelter. Most often, some of these
abuses emanate from trusted partners, security and justice officials who take
advantage of the vulnerability of those in their protection.
In Nigeria, the
need to broaden the scope and the debate on addressing gender based violence
from a focus on women and girls to include men and boys finds evidence in
recent rising waves of domestic violence targeted at men. The society’s
expectations and gender constructions of masculinity makes the discourse more
complicated as men and boys are expected to be strong even in the face of
abuse. While GBV targeted at women and girls still has a premium place in view
of the scale of abuse, it is imperative to put a spotlight on new issues and
trends on gender based violence in our quest to collectively find ways of
ending the menace.
We therefore call on justice and security institutions
to provide more protection and institute preventive laws to protect persons
vulnerable to violence while guaranteeing friendly and accessible means of
documenting reports from survivors. We call on all State Governors to
domesticate and operationalize the 2015 Violence Against Persons Prohibition
Act (VAPP) and the National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to
urgently pass the proposed Gender And Equal Opportunities Bill which seeks to
provide a legislation seeking to eliminate all forms of discrimination on the
basis of sex and gender in public and private spaces.
The
2017 theme calls on us all to leave No One Behind and end gender based violence
against all persons.
CLEEN
Foundation
Nigeria
