Campaign to end gender violence

Cathrine Biswick Herald Reporter
The country needs to wage a sustained and effective campaign to end gender-based violence and raise more awareness among communities, a senior Government official has said.Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development Ministry Permanent secretary Dr Sylvia Masango told scores of people during a campaign in Marondera on Tuesday that an aggressive campaign was needed to help communities to be knowledgeable about gender-based violence problems.

“We are holding these campaigns as a way of eliminating gender-based violence and there is an increase in the number of people who are reporting on abuses showing positive results on the awareness programmes that we are doing,” she said.

She said over US$3 million which was sourced from a number of funding partners was disbursed for the awareness campaigns country-wide.
“We have a number of agencies that have assisted us with over US$3 million to cover all the 10 provinces and so far we have covered the southern region and part of Harare,” Dr Masango said.

Women from Marondera, independent organisations, civil society, labour, faith-based organisations, police and other government agencies participated at the event to raise awareness on gender-based violence.

The campaign sought to enhance Government’s efforts to reach out to all women and support their economic empowerment and social emancipation. Among other issues, women raised concerns about the number of gender-based violence cases which were increasing habitually hence the need to sustain the campaign on violence against women and children throughout the year.

They also called for Government to provide enough resources to court systems to improve investigations of sexual offence cases in order to enhance conviction rate of rape and murder perpetrators in order to bring about justice to victims of gender-based violence.

Police say more than 1 600 children were reported raped in the first half of the year countrywide with relatives being singled out as main culprits.
They also say that rape cases have increased by 5 percent to 2 440 in the first half of the year compared to 2 326 recorded over the same period last year.

A total of 773 women were reported raped last year between January and June while this year the number reported increased to 812 during the same period, according to the police.