Take awareness on witchcraft, gender-violence to communities

By JACKLYN SIRIAS
AWARENESS for understanding gender-based and sorcery-related violence should be encouraged in communities, an advocate says.
Veronica Simogun, the director for Family of Change, an advocacy group in Wewak, told The National that their advocacy group believed in educating people to tackle the gender-based and sorcery-related violence.
“We have to give information to everybody if we want to see behaviour change that, and that includes children, youth, and adults,” she said.
She said they partnered Oxfam International under the Oxfam Gender Justice Programme.
“Under these programmes we have two pillars that we implement — the first pillar is called the prevention pillar.”
Simogun said that was when they went out into the communities and did awareness and campaigns.
“We are targeting all levels of society whether it be youths, children, adults — everyone — because in Family for Change we believe in gender.
“We go into schools, we go into the communities and we also go into other institutions, national high school at Passam, secondary schools, and we also go to the media and talk about gender.”
“We do not talk about violence, we talk about gender and how it leads to violence and the effects of this gender-based violence.”
Simogun said the second pillar was the quality crisis support service.
“That is the Inap Nau campaign, which we launched on Monday in Port Moresby.
“The data that we have compiled, we have done the presentation to tell everybody that what we are doing is to improve our services to help our people create a safer society for everyone.”