The House of Representatives is to immediately write Speakers of the State Houses of Assembly to domesticate the Violence Against Persons and Childs Rights Act as a measure to curb the incessant cases of sexual abuses and other gender violence on women and children, especially rape.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila who gave the indication while receiving a delegation of 12 Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in his office on Friday in Abuja, stressed the need to tighten the laws on rape particularly as regard to consent.
Gbajabimila said the 360 members of the House would engage State Houses of Assembly Speakers through a conference on the urgent need to domesticate these Acts to tackle menace of sexual abuse in the country.
“I am aware that over 20 states are yet to domesticate the Child Right Act and the Violence Against Persons Act.
“Next week, I shall have a zoom meeting with all the speakers and I hope that at the end, these Acts will be domesticated across the 36 states,” he said.
The Speaker emphasised that the 9th House of Representatives was seriously concerned about rape and all other forms of abuses in line with its Legislative Agenda, stressing that all the 360 Houses of Assembly were solidly behind the fight against rape.
He further said that the bar on sexual harassment was very low in Nigeria as compared to developed countries, noting that “In some countries, just complementing a woman could be sexual harassment depending on how she feels but here you can even stroke her hair”.
The former Majority Leader of the House also said for some women who are not so strong, rape was like a death sentence as they live with the scar for the rest of their life.
Gbajabiamila who directed the House of Representatives Clerk to write to the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to commence aggressive awareness against rape, said the House would ensure that police officers handling rape related issues are well trained in the technicalities required so as to secure convictions in court.
In her remarks, the leader of the delegation, Chioma Aguegbo decried that many years after the Child Right Act and the Violence Against Persons Act were passed, only about six states have domesticated them.
Aguegbo, while lamenting the rising cases of rape in the country, said the CSOs had compiled a list of 100 reported rape cases across the country from January to date and solicited the support of the House to help tame the rising wave of abuses.
On her part, Dorothy Njemanze, executive director of Dorothy Njemanze Foundation, called for the criminalisation and prompt prosecution of gender-based violent cases regardless of family factors such as dropping rape cases because of fear of stigma.
“I have suffered sexual violence; I have suffered domestic violence; I have suffered different kinds of violence and today I live my life doing things to help victims of sexual violence.
“We have not seen the progress that we are supposed to see. We want deliberate criminalisation so that family members who engage in sexual violence will be criminalized,” she said.
