The Acting Executive Director of CLEEN Foundation, Mr. Peter Maduoma, in a recent interview with JULIANA FRANCIS, discloses the reason CLEEN is partnering with the Police Community Relations Committee (PCRC) to create awareness about Gender Based Violence, and also how to prevent it. The training is being replicated in other states. Excerpt.
What Is The Purpose Of the CLEEN Foundation Partnership with PCRC On Gender violence Prevention?
CLEEN Foundation is a civil society organisation that was started in 1998 by Mr. Innocent Chukwuma, of late memory, and his wife, Josephine Chukwuma.
CLEEN Foundation has been around for about 27 years now, working in the area of public safety, security, and justice reform.
In the course of pursuit in these three dimensions, we’ve been working with police over the years and a lot of other security agencies in terms of ensuring that we make our mark in the area of having a public environment, where there is safety and where there is security, as well as access to justice.
We know that in the society, there are many people that are crying out for justice, and our organizations do a lot of work in that area to ensure that the justice reform becomes something that can address the need of the people, especially in the Criminal Justice Administration Ecosystem.
What Informed This Training, and Why Focus Gender Based Violence?
This training is part of the project that we are running, funded by the Ford Foundation. It is centred on gender-based violence prevention.
We’ve been doing that in the external ecosystem of the Nigerian police, but this time around, we are taking it into the police system.
The issue is that the police occupy a very central position when it comes to the administration of criminal justice, which also involves sexual violence and gender-based violence.
They are supposed to be the number one in the vanguard to ensure that this doesn’t happen. But again, from our experience, we discovered that it’s easy to wait in the station, waiting for this incident of violence to happen, and then you begin to think about what to do in terms of arrest, in terms of detention, in terms of prosecution, and getting judgment, and then sends the person to the correctional center, depending on the level of judgment that the person gets.
But this time around, we are saying that there should be a change, there should be a turnaround. The situation that the police serve is in the forefront of prevention, and we are bringing it to the community level.
And that’s why we are involving the PCRC, which is the Police Community Relations Committee, across 12 states of the Federation, six in the north and six in the south.
That’s the first phase of the project, so that if we train the police in terms of going to the local communities to be in the vanguard, ahead of everybody, to keep campaigning and sensitising the community that GBV should not be the order of the day.
Also, bringing forth strategies, ideas, ways and means of preventing it from happening. We think that we’ll be having a very social change that is very commendable and positive.
With respect to penetrating the communities, we feel that the people we need to work with in the community are the PCRC, because these are men and women of worth in the community who have voluntarily brought themselves to assist the police in the work they do in the communities.
That’s why this particular training is focused on the chairmen from the six states we’ve chosen in the south. However, we are using Lagos as our venue.
These PCRC chairmen and chairpersons came from Lagos State, and they were taken from Ogun, Imo, Enugu, Edo and Delta. That’s the representation we have here.
So, while we are training them and sharing a lot of experience from our well-known facilitators who are facilitating, including some of the things we have done in CLEEN Foundation, these PCRC members should be able to go back to their communities and be ambassadors who continue to drive to ensure we all prevent gender-based violence at the community level.
Every one of us comes from one community or the other, and that’s why we are going to the grassroots to drive the change. In those communities, we’re giving the police the privilege, working with them, to choose a community that we can work in and measured our change. The change we want to see is a remarkable reduction in Gender-Based Violence.
What mechanism is the CLEEN Foundation putting in place to check or ensure that PCRC members will replicate this training in their communities?
After the training, we are going to be in touch with each of them, monitoring what they do, and in the campaigns or the sensitisation, we’ll also be involved. This is because we do not want to just train people and leave them without a follow up.
It’s useless to train people, and then they are back to square one. We want them to go to the same communities and do the sensitisation instead of being at the judgment seat. Let them be at the preventive point.
So far, the police remain in judgment, waiting for GBV to happen. When people come to make reports, just like we learned in the training session today, some police officers do not have empathy. If you do not put yourself in that position, you may not be able to help the person out.
Instead of judging, because most of the time, these police officers ask the victim, ‘Are you not the cause of it?’ Some of those same things that demoralise the survivor, and we as people most times do not take such questions seriously, they deserve.
So, we are looking at the situation where, after the training, we’re trusting that these PCRC members will go and start implementing what they’ve learned and pass it forward in their communities.
If you are the vanguard of being number one advocate of the community against GBV, it will be also be a good thing for you to know exactly what it’s all about.
The truth is that some of them may not even know what it is all about in the real sense. This is part of the essence of this training; making it clear to them on what GBV is all about.
Don’t you think that the Police Gender Unit needs this training because of the shoddy way it handles GVB cases? The officers collect money, criminalising poverty, and empowering perpetrators.
You know that CLEEN Foundation is one of the organization, the foremost organisation that led the issue of establishing Gender Desks In Nigerian Police, Nigerian Army, Nigerian Air Force, Nigerian Navy.
We are the ones in 2016 or 17, that did who ensured that all these people have Gender Desks. We are still in touch with what they are doing because we partner to establish gender desks under the MacArthur Foundation funding. What we are seeing now is that we need to widen it.
The Gender Desks are doing a lot, but it is overwhelming. I was speaking with one of the participants right now; she said if you get to her office, you’ll see many case files on her table, which are mainly referrals from the government of the state for her to deal with this issue.
The issue, GBV, which we are talking about, is spreading too fast, so we have to double our efforts. We feel that PCRC is a grassroots support for policing in the community.
We feel that if they have accurate knowledge about gender-based violence, the causes of it, and the trauma that it brings to women and the girl child, then they will get into the field and incorporate it. I don’t think many of them are doing anything about gender, the PCRC at the grassroots.
They are all focusing on core security. However, we know that sexual violence is a driver of community conflict. So we want to empower them, also challenge them to go to the grassroots, and be able to spread this message on GBV and also prevent it.
We hope for a better outcome, and good results, tangible testimonies to show that there is a change in the social order as they go back to their communities.
