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 certainly one of them grew to become 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 women like Binta proceed to endure. 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 girls’s trauma impacts their capability to pursue training, 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 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 accomplice violence. Nevertheless, not one of the survivors had 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violence had been reported, 41% of them involving sexual violence, and the youngest sufferer was simply 18 months outdated.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 just lately fined a rapist D50,000 for assaulting a 13-year-old lady, 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, but it surely additionally serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence girls and women nonetheless face.
Whereas the world celebrates progress, many ladies, like Binta, proceed to expertise the darkest moments of their lives. Today ought to be a name to motion, urging us to ask: What does our celebration imply if thousands and thousands of ladies and women stay unsafe, unheard, and unprotected? True progress shouldn’t be 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, Youngsters, and Social Welfare, The Gambia Fee for Human Rights, and the Community Towards Gender-Primarily based Violence are working tirelessly to handle and forestall gender-based violence.
My organisation Fantanka can also be making a distinction by mentorship, management coaching, and group advocacy applications.
Up to now, Fantanka has empowered over 1,000 girls and women, supplied psychosocial help 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 programs that permit violence to persist, working towards a society the place girls 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, Suppose Younger Girls, and The Women’ Agenda, are additionally taking part in important roles on this struggle.
The struggle in opposition to 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 help to heal. People and communities should be educated about proof preservation methods.
Schooling performs a vital position; colleges should be secure areas the place younger women are inspired to talk out, and boys are taught to respect and shield, moderately than hurt.
Neighborhood engagement is equally 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, guaranteeing that survivors really feel supported moderately 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 women are actually secure, supported, and empowered. Will we be the technology that takes a stand? Now could be 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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