A coalition of non-government organisations under the aegis of Working Group of Eight (WG8), working to promote the rights of women and girls in Nigeria, held a four-day workshop in Lagos on gender sensitivity and capacity building to equip and boost the skills and capacity of CSOs and CBOs for effective monitoring and support services to gender-based violence victims. Senior Correspondent, ONYEWUCHI OJINNAKA reports.
Against the backdrop of this human rights charter, several cases of violence against women go unreported, largely due to some socio-cultural factors, including fear of stigmatisation, loss of source of livelihood and family life, among others. Few reported cases are not well documented, thus inhibiting monitoring of outcomes. It is against this backdrop that a coalition of eight focused non-governmental organisations (NGOs) known as Working Group of Eight (WG8) organised a four-day workshop/training on gender sensitivity and capacity-building, tailored to equip and boost the skills and capacity of CSOs and Community-based Organisations (CBOs) within Lagos State.
The WG8 include Alliance for Africa (AFA), BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP) and Partnership for Justice (JP). Others are Project Alert on Violence against Women, West Africa Network for Peace Building (WANEP), Women’s Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON) and Women’s Rights and Health Project (WRAHP).
The import of the training was for participants to acquire skills on how to handle cases and victims of violence, to effectively offer the right assistance and support services to the victims. Facilitators at the workshop, which had in attendance over 80 participants from various gender-based NGOs across Lagos were the executive director of Project Alert, Josephine Effah-Chukwuma; the executive programme director of LEDAP, Adaobi Egboka; and Chibogu Obinwa.
At the training, participants were offered wide opportunity to know more about advocacy on violence against women, how to handle such cases and manage the victims or survivors that are involved. Guidelines on how to offer assistance to victims of violence were discussed.
In her lecture titled ‘Responding to Gender based Violence: Practical Support Services’, Effah-Chukwuma elaborated more on providing support services to victims and survivors of violence. She listed other support services such as psychological and counselling, medical assistance, taking cases to the police for investigation and prosecution, provision of shelter and ensuring the safety of the victims as well as assisting the victim with legal aid.
In her paper which anchored mainly on legal remedies for victims, Mrs. Egboka, a lawyer, tutored the participants on guidelines for responding to cases of violence against women, enabling laws to be used as legal tools for prosecution and legal options for victims.
Participants were also taught that on their first contact with any victim of assault or violence, they should calmly introduce themselves to the victim, establish their problem, and counsel them to settle down. Other guidelines include legal processes/procedures, basic counselling and safety of the victims, case management, and referrals to organisations/government agencies, among others.
At the end of the workshop, some participants who spoke with TheNiche expressed delight on the training. One of them, Salisu Kaleen, a Community Development Association (CDA) chairman in Ikeja, said he was in the workshop to learn more on how women are being victimised and the way out of such problems.
“With the workshop, I am really enlightened as to various incidents that were not known to me before which is now well understood and I have learnt how to tackle or handle such if it happens in my community,” he said.
Other participants, who spoke to TheNiche on conditions of anonymity due to the sensitive position they occupy in their NGOs, expressed satisfaction that the workshop gave them leverage to know the law backing gender violence and violence against women and girls.
According to them, the workshop made them know more on how and when to go to first point of contact; that there is great difference between advice and counselling , as the two are applied separately because they serve different purposes. One of the participants explained that it is not just having an organisation and taking care of the people. “You have to also put empathy on what you are doing; not just to gather them together and not taking care of them. You not only advise them, but counsel them and also follow up on their cases to ensure that it would not reoccur,” a participant said.
Another participant, Mrs Vicky Oyegun of Child’s Right Organisation, Agege, said her organisation is involved in cases of violence against women but does more of referrals. According to her, lessons learnt from the workshop are enormous. “Lessons learnt are new trends, referrals listing, counselling. You know most of us mistake advice for counselling, but we have really seen that there is great difference and I have learnt a lot by adding the little experience I have in counselling with life experiences that we have given out today.” While also expressing satisfaction with the workshop, Oyegun suggested that the programme should be replicated.
One of the organisers of the workshop and a facilitator, Mrs. Egboka expressed her satisfaction at the turn out of participants and involvement of many NGOs for the workshop, adding that the workshop is an innovation put together by WG8 to educate people more in their different fields and to let them acquire more skills on how to handle cases of violence and the victims.
She further said the import of the workshop was to teach the participants the necessary steps to follow and remedies to apply in handling such cases, expressing delight that the workshop was very successful, that participants went home with richer ideas, skills and knowledge on how to handle cases of gender violence as well as violence against women.
Some forms of violence against women are domestic violence, which does not affect only women but boys who are subjected to sexual harassment by older women, female genital mutilation, rape, emotional and psychological abuse, sexual harassment, sexual slavery, trafficking, forced prostitution, acid bath and obnoxious widowhood rites.