SERREKUNDA, The Gambia, Mar 07 (IPS) – In March 2000, 15-year-old Binta Manneh was keen to check her expertise 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 one in all them turned her worst nightmare. He overpowered her, silencing her screams, ignoring her pleas for mercy. He raped her, stealing her innocence, her desires, and a bit of her future. Binta by no means acquired justice.
Twenty-five years later, too many women like Binta proceed to undergo. In The Gambia, one in three women experiences sexual violence earlier than the age of 18, and almost 30% are married off earlier than they attain maturity.
These violations steal their futures and cripple nationwide improvement, as ladies’s trauma impacts their potential to pursue schooling, discover employment, and take part absolutely in society, making a vicious cycle of poverty and inequality. When half of the inhabitants is marginalized and denied fundamental 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 companion violence. Nevertheless, not one of the survivors had been capable of entry justice, highlighting a systemic failure within the authorized system.
From 2014 to 2017, 1,576 circumstances of gender-based violence had been reported, 41% of them involving sexual violence, and the youngest sufferer was simply 18 months outdated.
Disturbingly, in Farafenni, a Justice of the Peace lately 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 ladies’s achievements, but it surely additionally serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence ladies and women nonetheless face.
Whereas the world celebrates progress, many ladies, like Binta, proceed to expertise the darkest moments of their lives. At the present time ought to be a name to motion, urging us to ask: What does our celebration imply if tens of millions of girls and women stay unsafe, unheard, and unprotected? True progress is just not measured solely in ladies in management positions however within the security, assist, and alternatives given to essentially the most weak.
In The Gambia, organizations such because the Ministry of Gender, Youngsters, and Social Welfare, The Gambia Fee for Human Rights, and the Community In opposition to Gender-Based mostly Violence are working tirelessly to deal with and forestall 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 ladies and women, offered psychosocial assist to greater than 500 survivors of gender-based violence, and contributed to growing group consciousness, leading to extra circumstances being reported and higher accountability.
These efforts are serving to to dismantle the techniques that enable violence to persist, working towards a society the place ladies and women 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 enjoying 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 should be enacted and rigorously enforced. Perpetrators should face actual penalties, and survivors should be supplied with trauma-informed assist to heal. People and communities should be educated about proof preservation strategies.
Schooling performs a vital function; colleges should be secure areas the place younger women are inspired to talk out, and boys are taught to respect and shield, relatively than hurt.
Neighborhood engagement is equally very important. Advocates should work with conventional and non secular 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 relatively 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 ladies and women are actually secure, 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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