BY SUKUOLUHLE NDLOVU
The Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development has called for the review of the National Strategy for preventing and addressing Gender Based Violence against women and girls.
The blue print will provide guidance to all stakeholders towards the programming of GBV.
This came out at a workshop that was hosted by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) in Harare in commemoration of 16 days against Gender Based Violence “Shining the Spotlight on Resolution 522”.
This year’s programme ran under the theme; Unite, Invest in prevention of violence against women and girls.
The Minister of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises, Monica Mutsvangwa said the strategy is going to be launched this month.
“This strategy will be launched this month and we shall all be running with it and ensuring we implement the various strategies as guided by the document.
“Implementation of this strategy will go a long way in addressing GBV in the country. May l also point out that the government cannot achieve zero tolerance to GBV on its own, as such we need all stakeholders to come on board and work together with the government to ensure that we eradicate this scourge,” she said
GBV remains one of the underreported issues in the country.
“The Ministry together with other stakeholders continues to conduct awareness campaigns across the country and this is part of the prevention strategy where the media strongly comes in by ensuring that people access information through various platforms that are easily accessible to women and girls who are in most instances affected by GBV.
“Despite all these efforts GBV remains under- reported due to various reasons which include among others, the availability of GBV services, social pressures from relatives and lack of information regarding the legal framework,” said Mutsvangwa.
She emphasized that the Ministry together with other stakeholders will work together to ensure that these challenges are addressed and women and girls are free to report violence without fear of stigmatization or victimisation thereby improving their access to justice.
The government has managed to establish safe centers for GBV survivors.
“These centers have gone a long way in ensuring that survivors get GBV services and also provide protection services to those at risk of further violence from their partners. We implore on our partners to support us towards sustaining these Centres as their operations have greatly improved access to justice by survivors,” she said.
Mutsvangwa applauded MISA for the event ‘Shining the Spotlight on Resolution 522’ which recognises that digital violence is highly gendered and disproportionately affects women. The Ministry is ready to work with MISA and other stakeholders to address digital violence against women particularly female journalists as this kind of violence prevents them from exercising their freedom of expression and from effectively executing their duties.
In a bid to curb GBV, the Ministry of ICT came up with the Cyber Security and Data Protection Act which is a milestone towards addressing digital facilitated GBV.
Efforts are being made to ensure that there is effective cooperation between law enforcement authorities and service providers with regards to the identification of perpetrators and gathering of information.
Forms of digital GBV against woman include cyber- harassment, cyber stalking and sexist hate speech.
