By Chris Agbo
Disability Rights Advocacy Center (DRAC) on the 8th and 9th of September, 2020 organized a two-day stakeholders’ meeting on effective response to violence against women and girls with disabilities (WGWDs) in Nigeria.
The meeting which is part of DRAC’s policy-to-practice (P2P) project, supported by the RoLAC program of the British Council and European Union was organized to identify the gaps in the delivery of SGBV services for persons with disabilities, especially women and girls in Nigeria as well as challenges faced by service providers in the delivery of those services to enable DRAC develop a comprehensive toolkit that will provide guidance on Disability Inclusive Service Delivery to all service providers in SGBV response interventions.
The Executive Director of DRAC, Dr. Irene Ojiugo Patrick-Ogbogu in her opening remarks said that the project seeks to improve access to justice for women and girls with disabilities while emphasizing that one of the key components of securing justice for women and girls with disabilities is to ensure that they have access to sexual and gender-based violence services. DRAC has carried out researches in this area such an accessibility audit of criminal justice services in the FCT which showed that when a woman with disability experiences sexual or gender-based violence, it is usually a huge challenge for her to access justice because the service providers within the justice system are not trained on how to handle issues related to person with disabilities. There is also a lot of stigmatization and discrimination in their approach while providing services to persons with disabilities. Furthermore, many women with disabilities are ignorant of their rights to seek redress in cases of SGBV and the type of services that should be provided for them at the facilities. All these show that WGWDs face different forms of barriers while accessing SGBV services, and where barriers exist in service delivery, the implication is that WGWDs are unable to access justice. Therefore, their experiences of violence and abuse continue unabated as acts of violence committed against them go unreported.
Speaking further, she said that the meeting is an important step towards getting inputs from women with disabilities themselves who are on the demand side, and service providers who usually consist of government agencies, stakeholders, CSOs and all others organizations within the justice system to pull all voices together and document what can be done to ensure that programs and interventions are disability inclusive and tailored towards responding to the needs of women and girls with disabilities in Nigeria. The findings would be compiled into a document framework in form of a toolkit to serve as a guide for both service providers and persons with disabilities. This will help WGWDs to know their rights and what justice services are available for them. It will also guide service providers to provide disability-inclusive services, while taking into consideration the peculiar needs of different types of disabilities of WGWDs. In other words, service providers need to be mindful of the diversity and peculiarities that exist within the disability spectrum and consider them while providing services.
The toolkit will be designed around the essential services package using a disability lens to ensure that women and girls with disabilities are able to access and utilize SGBV services on an equal basis with others.
The team of three consultants took the participants through interactive sessions on sexual and gender-based violence, disability inclusion and guiding principles for service providers, including persons with disabilities in sexual gender-based violence before conducting a needs assessment to identify and collect information to better understand the gaps or needs in the current response mechanism and the desired conditions.
The participants through group exercises were also made to analyze practical situations and provided interventions based on some case studies provided by the consultants. They were guided on using the best practices in responding to different situations.
The first day of the meeting engaged organizations of persons with disabilities and other civil society organizations working in the area of SGBV to get their inputs, while the second day brought together the service providers such as relevant government institutions, CSOs and other relevant organizations to also get their perspective. All these inputs would be compiled and carefully synthesized to develop a toolkit that will provide guidance to a wide range of stakeholders on disability inclusive service delivery, towards improving access to justice for women and girls with disabilities in Nigeria.
