What role can you play in the fight to bring an end to Gender Based violence?

Henry (2018)

When Gender-Based violence is mentioned, which group of victims first comes to your mind? Is it the males or females? Well, to whatever opinion someone may have, we cannot forego that fact that there are instances of Gender-Based violence to both females and males. And since each one of us belongs to a specific gender, it is thus everyone’s role to play a part in the struggle towards combatting Gender-Based violence.

Gender-based violence is violence directed against a person because of their gender. Gender-based violence is a phenomenon deeply rooted in gender inequality and continues to be one of the most notable human rights violations within all societies. Though both women and men experience gender-based violence, the majority of victims are women and girls. This is mostly as a result of power inequalities between men and women, be it physical power or administrative power. As a result, women face cases of physical/sexual harassment, rape, stalking, trafficking as well as sexual exploitation. Occasionally in men, such instances are at a lower rate.

As an individual, you can consider and practice the following in order to fight against gender-based violence.

Ø  First of all, prevention should start early in life. We can do this by educating and working with young boys and girls and teaching them how they can promote respectful relationships and gender equality. Here the bigger role can go to parents and guardians who play a bigger part in raising up their children. It is important that they instill in the children a culture of respecting any person regardless of their gender starting from their siblings.

Ø  Secondly, home and workplaces need to be made safer for women and girls by ensuring women’s economic self-sufficiency and security, and increasing women’s participation and decision-making powers—in the home and relationships, as well as in public life and politics. Mainly as leaders in companies or organizations, it is important to ensure that these aspects are respected in every workplace so as to ensure gender equity as well as equal privileges to both males and females

Ø  And to everyone else, you can play a role in ending gender-based violence by creating awareness or community mobilization through media and social media. It is important to speak up and be a voice for the victims through reporting any Gender-based violence cases on different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others.

Many organizations, activist groups, and platforms have come up to join the fight and different people can be part of them and have a role they can play to bring an end to Gender-Based violence. Personally, I attended an event organized by Afflatus Africa a non-governmental organization. The event is called Reading for Change and it is held monthly. This month’s theme was “The role of youth in shaping a generation free from Gender-Based violence”. As part of the event, they reviewed a book called Malice by Danielle Steel where a lady had been a victim of Gender-Based violence, especially physical and emotional violence. Different panelists also encouraged the youth to always come up and speak against any form of harassment and Gender-Based Violence. From this, I got one major take away that says that; “It is not all about saying that we are not concerned about gender-based violence because we have not been victims, it is us to strongly bring it to an end because it can happen to any other person we know, be it parent, brother, sister, relative, spouse or friend". Feel free to comment below to share with us your say about gender-based violence and how it can be prevented or controlled.

A pic of me having my say about what I think we as youth can do to end gender-based violence (holding the microphone).