Abuse Relief Corps, a nonprofit organisation with support from UNICEF Ghana, has organized a stakeholders workshop to deliberate on pressing issues on Sexual Gender base violence (SGBV) and the way forward.
The workshop took place on Friday, April 9, 2021.
The Executive Director of Abuse Relief Corps, Anthony Boateng Bediako, speaking to the media after the workshop said that his outfit provides support to victims of sexual abuse seeking justice.
He added that his organization specifically provide assistance with the medical report fee payment, transportation cost and generally assist the police with materials that would make the cases progress smoothly.
“A couple of months ago we held a pressing engagement to make presentations to the general public that we are running a project with UNICEF Ghana and it’s called ‘Case Management Of Sexual Gender Base Violence(SGBV) and that maiden encounter we provide a statistics on the cases we have worked on so far. Today’s meeting a workshop for the various stakeholders so particularly we have Dovvsu officers from the Ghana Police Service, Department of Social Welfare, Activists and other Nongovernmental organisations that have a role to play in cases of SGBV”, he said.
“The goal of this workshop is to bring us all together as stakeholders so that we can interact and discuss best practices. Some of the topics discussed were Inter-Sectoral Procedures(ISSOP) in managing sexual and gender-based cases and the various roles that we as stakeholders have to play in working out these cases”, he added.
Mr Bediako added that the workshop was to highlight the roles of the stakeholders such as the reps from the health sector, Police service, Ghana Education as well as the NGOs, families and all those that matter in the society.
“Our roles will be discussed and the way forward to improve our efforts. So far in October 2020 about sixty-nine cases were been worked on but now we are around Hundred and thirty-one cases and the majority of them are females. These are cases are girls and boys who are below eighteen years,” he said.
The regional girls education officer in the Greater Accra region, Madam Christiana Azure Ayinyoza mentioned that her role as the girl’s officer was to encourage them to report the sexual abuse cases to the authorities in charge.
“My work as the education officer is to encourage the victims to reports to authorities in charge. The challenges we face is that gender-based violence is a criminal act when it comes to sexual abuse a lot of our children goes under forms of abuse and sexual abuse is one of them”.
She furthermore stated that her outfit has taken it upon itself to sensitise the children to report all abuse cases.
“Those that we can investigate and know for example when the attitude of the victim in school changes you will see that some of them will not be happy in class.”
“The teachers and children are been sensitise so that you would be able to observe and know that the child is going through some form of abuse and then find out what kind of abuse is the child is going through and find the solution. Ghana Education Service does not handle abuse cases because it’s a criminal case; Madam Azure Ayinzoya started”.
