Lack of communication blamed for poor records

COMMUNICATION is one of the major problems in keeping updated data on family and sexual violence cases in the country, says a police officer.
Sergeant Wasima Kauvianda from the Family Sexual Violence Unit national coordination office in Port Moresby told The National that other problems include officers’ lack of knowledge on ways to collect data, when dealing with daily reported cases.
He was responding to questions on the statistics of sexual offence cases that involved especially children.
“Currently we are undergoing a week-long training on standard operating procedure (SOP) for our FSVU members in the National Capital District,” he said.
The SOP training was facilitated by the Justice Service Stability for Development under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade programme.
Kauvianda believed that such training would upskill officers to gather accurate data for record keeping.
“The training helped us to look at procedures and processes we could respond to help the victims of family sexual violence issues by talking to them, making arrest on perpetrators, issuing interim protection orders and see if we can refer them to other referral pathways to seek further assistance,” he said.
He said these procedures and processes all contributed to the accuracy of data collection.
Kauvianda also said when it comes to collecting data from outside centres in the country it was quiet difficult.
“Most of the time, we rely on mobile phones to pass information but when there is network issues, data collection becomes an issue,” he said.
Kauvianda said they did not have accurate records of the different family and sexual violence cases that they deal with.