Juliana Francis 
CLEEN Foundation is among the foremost civil society organisations in Nigeria, which worked tirelessly to come up with what is known today as Gender Desks in many uniform and law enforcement agencies in Nigeria. The primary goal of this desk is to attend to and professionally handle complaints related to Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV).
However, the personnel of the Nigeria Police Force remain the first responders in issues related to Gender Based Violence. Over the years, the Gender Desk has become the go-to for many lawyers, victims, survivors, including scholars in need of information for academic purposes.
CLEEN Foundation has presently decided to expand the scope of checking and preventing SGBV by going to the grassroots, which includes different communities in Nigeria. CLEEN Foundation, however, knows that it cannot achieve this ambition on its own, therefore, it decided to partner with the Police Community Relations Committee (PCRC) to reach citizens at the grassroots. CLEEN Foundation decided to train members of the PCRC on how to check and prevent escalating cases of GBV in communities.
Training
Most of the PCRC communities picked for the training were from the southern region, comprising six states. The training took off on May 27, 2025 and ended May 28. The two-day training, which was held in Ikeja, Lagos State, witnessed a large turnout of PCRC members, including their National Chairman, Alhaji Mogaji Olaniyan. The training is supported by the Ford Foundation.
There were two trainers on ground to help the participants navigate the complex world of GBV. They were Ms. Itoro Eze-Anaba and Ms. Comfort Eshiet, both from Mirabel Centre in the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja. Itoro Eze-Anaba, a lawyer, founded the Mirabel Centre, the first Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Nigeria. Eshiet is a psychosocial therapist, Sexual Trauma Counsellor at Mirabel Centre.
The Acting Executive Director of CLEEN Foundation, Mr Peter Maduoma set the ball rolling by welcoming the participants and explaining why the training was crucial, stressing that, “prevention is better than cure.”
17 SDGs
He explained that in 2015, the United Nations, in its bid to address global challenges and promote sustainable development by 2030, set out the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by which countries are being measured. At No 5 of the SDGs is the Gender Equality Goal which is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.
About six areas of action were outlined toward achieving this gender equality and empowerment goal, and one of them is the elimination of all forms of violence against all women and girls in public and private spheres, including trafficking, sexual and other types of exploitation.
He added: “Despite that Nigeria signed this United Nations legislation, we continue to observe that little is being done to ensure that we as a nation, achieve the goal by the year 2030, which is about five years from now.
It is to this effect that CLEEN Foundation, funded by its donor, the FORD Foundation, is carrying out this intervention and training for the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and its Police Community Relations Committee (PCRC) in 12 states across the nation. “It is to ensure that the NPF and PCRC are at the forefront of Gender Based Violence (GBV) prevention.
We seek to change the current pattern of waiting for GBV to happen and then seeking to do something in terms of arresting, detaining, prosecuting and getting a judgment. So this training, among others, seeks to build the capacity of the PCRC members and to put them in a position to be vanguards for GBV prevention in communities for social change.
“It is our expectation that all participants will fully engage in this training knowing that it is our collective responsibility to eliminate all forms of GBV in our communities and the nation at large through being proactive.
“Each participant is a representative of a larger community. We factored in PCRC because we know how strategic it is to the police. We want a Police Force that is people-centred. We also know that prevention is cheaper. We need to be proactive rather than reactive to violence towards the girl-child and women.”
Bridge
Speaking on Understanding Gender Based Violence, Eze-Anaba said: “PCRC is the bridge between the community and the Police. If you want to stop violence in the community, you start with Gender Based Violence. Anything you do to me because I am a woman is GBV. “There are many things women go through which are Gender Based Violence, like battering, now femicide is on the increase.
Women are supposed to be loved by their husbands. Rape is when you have sex with a woman without her consent. Sexual violence is the absence of consent. If she says yes to sex today, it doesn’t mean she can say yes tomorrow. “Also, a child cannot give consent for sex. No child under 18 can give consent for sex. In Lagos State, having sexual intercourse with a child can attract life imprisonment.”
Eze-Anaba said that there are many types of violence when it comes to issues relating to women. She mentioned that emotional violence is when a spouse continually puts his spouse down. “We have many adults broken because of their childhood experiences, where parents will be insulting each other,” she said.
She said economic abuse is when a husband asks his wife to stay at home, not allowing her to work; she would be forced to ask him for money for all her needs, including money for sanitary pads, undergarments, and others. Eze-Anaba said: “She is forced to stay at home even though she can work. He doesn’t want her to be empowered. Gender violence is rooted in gender imbalance. If we want to have a better, safer society, we need to look at our homes.”
VVF
She is said that it was not all right for relatives to force an orphaned child into marriage, adding that such a girlchild could develop Vaginal Vault Fistula (VVF).
VVF can also happens when the girl-child is raped, leading to continuous flow of urine. Spaeaking on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Eze-Anaba said that it is common among Ekiti and Akwa-Ibom. She said that the health implications are terrible, especially when the recipient wants to give birth to a baby.
The woman mentioned that the widowhood rite is another form of violence against women, which is also being practised in Akwa-Ibom.
She explained that in this instance, a woman, wife, would also be blamed for the death of her husband, even if the man died of cancer. She added: “Even if her husband died of cancer, she would be blamed and accused of inflicting cancer on her late husband.
After the corpse has been given a bath, she would be forced to drink the water to show her lack of culpability. Some widows are asked not to go to markets or trade until they are cleansed.
“Nobody talks about how the children would survive, feed or go to school. It is worse if the widow does not have a male child for the late husband; she could be forced to marry someone younger from the husband’s family. But if a woman dies, in less than a year, the husband would be asked to remarry.”
Root causes
According to Eze-Anaba, the root causes of these aforementioned issues are culture and tradition, gender inequality, patriarchal norms, cultural beliefs, harmful traditional practices, conflicts and insecurity, economic dependency and poverty, weak justice system and lack of accountability.
Eze-Anaba asked: “How many of us are accountable to women because of cultural beliefs and tradition. Our collective power as men and women is a root cause of Gender Based Violence.”
Factors contributing to GBV are low reporting due to stigma and fear, inadequate survivor support services, insufficient legal enforcement, cultural silence and victim blaming, lack of public awareness and education. “When a girl gets pregnant, she is not allowed to continue with her education, while her male counterpart can continue with his education.
How do we react when we hear such incidents? What is our role as PCRC members in terms of prevention? Dressing has nothing to do with rape. A rapist is a rapist, it has nothing to do with dressing. A baby in diaper, who is three months old was defiled, she’s our youngest survivor and our oldest rape victim is over 80 years old.”
Eze-Anaba said that the role of PCRC in addressing GBV is promoting awareness and sensitising communities, supporting survivors in accessing justice and services, strengthening police-community collaboration, monitoring police handling of GBV cases, and advocating for accountability and legal reforms. Comfort Eshiet said that before anyone can start talking about talking or preventing GBV, he or she should treat their biases and stereotypes.
Eshiet explained that a stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Stereotypes are like myths. She said: “It is a myth to say that GBV only affects women, also it is a myth or stereotype to say that it is a private family matter.
GBV affects all genders, but women and girls are disproportionately impacted. GBV is a human rights violation and a public concern. As parents or guardians, when you collect money to stop the prosecution of gender based violence perpetrators, you are teaching the girlchild involved that it is okay to collect money for sex.
You are telling her that sex can be transactional. “It is also a myth to say victims provoke violence either through dressing or challenging their husbands. The truth is that a perpetrator is always responsible for the abuse. It is untrue to say that only poor or uneducated people experience GBV; it cuts across all social, economic and educational levels.”
Harmful stereotypes
Eshiet said that harmful stereotypes are phrases such as “real men control their partners, women lie about abuse, boys don’t cry.” She added: “We need to be aware of our stereotypes because it can lead to biases and negative impact on investigation, intolerance and discrimination.”
Eshiet, who stressed that rape is often perpetrated by someone familiar to the victim, explained that rape is a special crime because most times the victim is blamed for the action of the perpetrator. She said: “A biased investigator will not do a thorough job. The truth as we know it is that GBV is preventable and education reduces it.”
