SERREKUNDA, The Gambia, Mar 07 (IPS) – In March 2000, 15-year-old Binta Manneh was keen to check her abilities at an out-of-town interschool sports activities competitors. That evening, as she stepped out to purchase biscuits from a close-by store, she encountered paramilitary officers – males sworn to guard the nation.
However considered one of them turned her worst nightmare. He overpowered her, silencing her screams, ignoring her pleas for mercy. He raped her, stealing her innocence, her goals, and a chunk of her future. Binta by no means acquired justice.
Twenty-five years later, too many ladies like Binta proceed to endure. In The Gambia, one in three ladies experiences sexual violence earlier than the age of 18, and practically 30% are married off earlier than they attain maturity.
These violations steal their futures and cripple nationwide growth, as girls’s trauma impacts their skill to pursue schooling, discover employment, and take part totally in society, making a vicious cycle of poverty and inequality. When half of the inhabitants is marginalized and denied primary rights, it stalls social and financial progress.
In 2023, The Gambia registered 575 circumstances of gender-based violence, together with rape, sexual assault, and intimate accomplice violence. Nevertheless, not one of the survivors have been in a position to entry justice, highlighting a systemic failure within the authorized system.
From 2014 to 2017, 1,576 circumstances of gender-based violence have been reported, 41% of them involving sexual violence, and the youngest sufferer was simply 18 months previous.
Disturbingly, in Farafenni, a Justice of the Peace not too long ago fined a rapist D50,000 for assaulting a 13-year-old woman, regardless of The Gambia’s Sexual Offences Act 2013 mandating a minimal of 10 years’ imprisonment. This displays the systemic failures to guard victims and maintain perpetrators accountable.
March 8, Worldwide Girls’s Day, is a day to have a good time girls’s achievements, nevertheless it additionally serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence girls and ladies nonetheless face.
Whereas the world celebrates progress, many ladies, like Binta, proceed to expertise the darkest moments of their lives. At the present time must be a name to motion, urging us to ask: What does our celebration imply if hundreds of thousands of girls and ladies stay unsafe, unheard, and unprotected? True progress just isn’t measured solely in girls in management positions however within the security, help, and alternatives given to probably the most susceptible.
In The Gambia, organizations such because the Ministry of Gender, Kids, and Social Welfare, The Gambia Fee for Human Rights, and the Community In opposition to Gender-Primarily based Violence are working tirelessly to handle and stop gender-based violence.
My organisation Fantanka can also be making a distinction by way of mentorship, management coaching, and group advocacy applications.
To this point, Fantanka has empowered over 1,000 girls and ladies, offered psychosocial help to greater than 500 survivors of gender-based violence, and contributed to rising group consciousness, leading to extra circumstances being reported and larger accountability.
These efforts are serving to to dismantle the techniques that permit violence to persist, working towards a society the place girls and ladies are protected and valued. Different organizations, just like the Feminine Attorneys Affiliation, Girls in Liberation and Management, Girls’s Affiliation for Girls & Victims’ Empowerment, Assume Younger Girls, and The Ladies’ Agenda, are additionally taking part in very important roles on this combat.
The combat towards gender-based violence requires a collective effort from governments, companies, communities, and people.
Stronger legal guidelines have to be enacted and rigorously enforced. Perpetrators should face actual penalties, and survivors have to be supplied with trauma-informed help to heal. People and communities have to be educated about proof preservation methods.
Training performs an important position; faculties have to be protected areas the place younger ladies are inspired to talk out, and boys are taught to respect and shield, quite than hurt.
Group engagement is equally very important. Advocates should work with conventional and spiritual leaders to make use of their affect to problem dangerous practices and advocate for justice. Households should foster open dialogues, making certain that survivors really feel supported quite than shamed.
This Worldwide Girls’s Day let’s not simply have a good time progress however let’s additionally work to create a world the place girls and ladies are actually protected, supported, and empowered. Will we be the era that takes a stand? Now’s the time to behave.
Mariama Jobarteh is CEO/Founding father of Fantanka, a public well being skilled and advocate for gender justice, juvenile justice, psychological well being, and transitional justice in The Gambia
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