FCTA scales up anti-GBV advocacy, empowers youth to speak up

By Stanley Onyekwere

In what seems as a reinvigorated commitment towards scaling up anti-Gender Based Violence (GBV), the Federal Capital Territory Administration has exposed and incorporated youth mainly girls into its advocacy initiative to commemorate the 16-days activism against GBV targeted at creating and escalating awareness drive on the menace in the Territory.
In particular, no fewer than three hundred school-aged girls were at the weekend enlightened and empowered to actively participate in combating the GBV menace, by always speaking out especially when they are maltreated or harassed sexually.
The students, drawn from the 62 wards of the six FCT Area Councils, colourfully dressed with a touch orange, had converged at the mini stadium inside the Old Parade Ground, in Abuja, for the FCT Orange Run organised by the office of the Mandate Secretary, FCT Women Affairs Secretariat, during which they alongside other stakeholders were sensitised on how to unite, and invest to prevent gender based violence in their respective communities.
Speaking at the event, Mandate Secretary For FCT Women Affairs Secretariat (FCT-WAS), Honourable Adedayo Benjamins-Laniyi said the FCTA advocacy initiative, re-echoes that GBV and such similar acts will not be tolerated in the nation’s capital.
Benjamins-Laniyi noted that to enable Government nip the menace in the bud, parents and community leaders who prevent GBV victims or their families as wards or subjects from speaking out, because of stigma, should desist from such act.
She however, enjoined GBV victims to use the phone number 080 78 11 11 26 to report such act for further and appropriate action, assuring that they would be protected.
She revealed that the FCT Minister, Barrister Nyesom Wike is currently championing ‘ FCT Day of The Adolescent Girl Child’, in the territory, towards creating safe space for them.
According to her: “ This will become a national event by next year.But it is starting here, Abuja, with Nyesom Wike as the Super champion of He for She for adolescent girls in the FCT.
“In FCT, to orange our world, means to orange the hope of the adolescent girl child. It is to teach our young girls to speak up and not to allow anyone to intimidate them. Please call, speak- out, report, do not hold back, there is help.
“We at FCTA Women Affairs Secretariat has Mr Project backing to bring renewed hope to the people. We want to assure this young girls that when perpetrators of this wicked act tell you not to speak, it is a lie.
“You need to report, because if you don’t report their is no reference to what we need to follow through in the place of getting justice.
“ We will provide protection for you and intervention by giving you a safe space; until the challenge and the threat to your life is gone. The Secretariat will work with all women and girls including people living with disabilities, IDPs and the vulnerable groups in rural areas.
“ Our agenda as a gender is not to course division or stigmatized the boy child, it is rather to create a holistic environment where the boy respect the girl child and the girl child respect the boy child, and they together have an inter-gender representation of the renewed hope of this nation in leadership.”