By Morish Dramadri

Arua

The West Nile child and family protection unit has handed over a site for the construction of a regional Juvenile Gender Based Violence (GBV) reception center at the regional police headquarter in Arua city.

Gender-based violence is violence directed against a person because of that person's gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately.

The project worthy 195 million undertaken by Save Children with funding from the foreign affairs ministry of Japan has been contracted to “Self-building” investments limited for a period of 4 months, and is expected to be commissioned around January 2024.

During the project site handover in Arua city on Friday 08^th September 2023, Charity E’yoru the project manager of save the children Arua, revealed that the project comes in line with the repeated appeal by the police to have a house for child offenders so as to curb GBV in the region. “One concern the police has been raising is the need for a protection house for the children who are in conflict with the law, the juvenile offenders. So as Save the Children being a child focused organization, we took this up with support from Japan government’s ministry of foreign affairs”, E’yoru said.

West Nile’s child and family protection unit has had a lot of challenges in accommodating the victims of GBV given its high number of cases registered.

Hon. Kalsum Abdu Fadmullah the Arua city secretary for social services while representing the city mayor during the site handover disclosed that they still have a lot of plans to develop the police section in the city. “I know police still has a lot of land which needs development as a city we are also planning soon we shall be having a lot of transformation in the police jurisdiction because these facilities are for us”, Fadmullah promised.

Meanwhile Geoffrey Okiswa the Arua Resident District Commissioner welcomed the project and hopes it will bring an end to the suffering of the GBV victims in this region. “When it comes to domestic violence the most affected person is sometimes the innocent children, when they are with their mothers, then there is no facility and convenient housing arrangement for them. It was a very big problem in west Nile. So now we don’t want a situation where the affected victims were just sleeping in the verandas and staying in the streets as they await for justice to prevail”, Okiswa noted.

Records from the police Regional child and family protection office indicates that from the months of January to June 2023, West Nile region registered a total of 30 cases of child abuse, 173 cases of domestic violence, 107 cases of child neglect, 68 cases of missing children, 70 cases of family neglect and 17 cases of threatening violence.

COVER PHOTO: Oficials from Save the children, Arua City and District, top Regional Police officers and project contractor in a group photo at the site By Morish Dramadri