TechHer, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), says it will engage Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the Police to help fight Gender Based Violence (GBV) in the country.
The Executive Director, TechHer, Chioma Agwuegbo said this at the launch of Online Gender-Based Violence (OGBV) response website tagged: ‘Kuram’, on Thursday in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that TechHer is a platform set up to demystify technology and provide support, learning and collaboration for women in an encouraging and conducive environment.
Agwuegbo said that TechHer involved these organisations to explore every means to get justice for the victims.
She said: “One of the reasons that TechHer has engaged a team of lawyers is to ensure that we can explore very possible means to get justice for our people.
“We are also going to engage the Nigerian Bar Association, we are going to engage the police so that it would be a 360 solution for people who have suffered violence in Nigeria.”
Agwuegbo said that a lot of people do not come out to speak because they fear retribution and the fact that the stories would come out on blogs.
“One of the things we take very seriously is privacy. We are bound by all of the laws, especially in Nigeria that relates to data protection.
“We have a pact with our community that whatever they tell us is stays with us and as a matter of fact it is something we have learnt that sometimes people just report these cases and they do not really want justice.
“They just want to let it out so before we go forward with trying to get justice, we speak with them and it is on the bases of their express consent, which they can withdraw at any time that we can take these matters forward,” she said.
Also, the Executive-Director, DIGICIVIC Initiative, Mojirayo Ogunlana said the organisation would create a compilation of prosecutorial manual to prosecute online violence.
Ogunlana said there would be a prosecutorial manual that would put laws together in order to aid in prosecuting perpetrators.
“Coming from the legal perspective, we are going to create a prosecutorial manual, a document that will flow from a compilation of all the laws in Nigeria that online violence can be prosecuted from.
“When the prosecutorial manual is produced, we will approach some law enforcement agencies and train them on online gender based violence.
“Hoping that they will be able to take it up and prosecute every perpetrator that they fined. We will then be able to link women and girls who are going through online violence.
“We serve a pressure group to the law enforcement agencies and we will do advocacy so that there will be a track record so that we can adress this evil before it becomes infested in our society,” she said.
Similarly; Keurtsing Tchouankea, Programme Officer, Embassy of France, said Cyber bullying affects the society.
Tchouankea said this was a big issue and the embassy was committed to help build this project and tackle the challenges.
She commended TechHer for its resilience in making sure that it comes up with a platform like this. (NAN)
