FIDA Trains Law Enforcement Agencies on Gender-based Violence

FIDA Trains Law Enforcement Agencies on Gender-based Violence

Kuni Tyessi in Abuja

The International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) has trained law enforcement agencies with a view to understanding and putting to effective use the Violence against Persons Prohibition (VAPP Act).

It revealed that human trafficking in which women and children are the major victims, is the third most common crime in Nigeria after drug trafficking and economic fraud, with 90 per cent of the affected migrant women arriving their destination with bruises and other signs of violence.

Programme Officer, FIDA Nigeria, Ifeanyi Iloba, who revealed this at a workshop with the theme “Prevention and Elimination of Violence against Women in Nigeria”, said over 70,000 African victims of women trafficking have Nigerian women accounting for over 70 per cent with Italy usually the targeted destination.

He said preventive approaches to mitigate incidence of violence in Nigeria include beat patrols, anti- vice squads, stop, detain and search and community policing among others. He said: “Factors underlying violence against women include male dominance and control, power hierarchies, anti- social personality disorder, harmful use of alcohol, lower levels of education, community norms that privilege or ascribe higher status to men and lower status to women.”

Others are “Low levels of women’s access to paid employment, marital discord and dissatisfaction, difficulties in communication between partners, gender inequality in education, access to employment, economic and property rights freedom to marry as well as divorce.”

Programme manager, FIDA Nigeria, Subomi Chukwu, in her own revelations, said global statistics as documented by the United Nations, shows that gender based violence or violence against women and girls affects one in three women in their lifetime and 35 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and or sexual intimate partner violence or non -partner sexual violence. She added that globally, seven per cent of women have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner and as many as 38 per cent of murders of women are committed by an intimate partner, while over 200 million have experienced female genital mutilation among other unhealthy practices against women.

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