Delay in family sexual violence cases worrying: N’Dranou

By JACKLYN SIRIAS
NATIONAL Capital District Metropolitan Superintendent Perou N’Dranou is concerned about the delay in processing family sexual violence cases.
He told The National that many women and men were coming in to lodge complaints which had to be recorded manually since there were no computers.
“It will be useful if we could have computers that can help us to quickly complete cases so that we can help everyone who comes seeking help,” N’Dranou said.
“We do not want to turn away victims of family sexual violence. But at the moment we do not have the capacity because we are still manually writing down reports. This usually follows a long and tedious process that is also time consuming.”
He urged stakeholders and donors to provide police a computerised database to make it easy for officers to deal with such cases quickly.
N’Dranou, in response to complaints by victims that original charges were changed when the case came to court, said it was to do with the law.
“Sometimes, when an offender is charged with a number of charges initially, the arresting officer then goes through those charges to see if there are similar elements in them,” he said.
“If the officer sees that there were similar elements in the offences, he would throw out the other charges and uses one that will cover all the offences and ensure it leads to a conviction.”