Psychosocial First Aid: SCI trains Gombe Community Based Organizations, others
Psychosocial First Aid: SCI trains Gombe Community Based Organizations, others
Save the Children International (SCI) has organized 2 days of training for Community-Based Organizations (CBO) and stakeholders standing against child Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in Gombe state.
According to SCI, the training was to equip the CBO with the needed knowledge to provide Psychosocial First Aid (PFA) and counselling to survivors of sexual GBV in their respective communities.
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The Community Engagement and Advocacy Coordinator of the SCI’s REACH project in Gombe, Mr Akpan Effiong said, “The essence is that we are looking at counselling as one of the critical interventions that can benefit children positively in terms of survival of sexual gender-based violence”.
He further stated that the training was occasioned growing of numbers of reported cases of sexual GBV, “Especially during the COVID-19 era, we discover that the CBO need to be equipped with the necessary knowledge to provide basic counselling and psychosocial support to survivals at the community level”.
He explained that the participants were drawn from communities in Banlanga, Dukku Local Government Area of the state. “We choose participants from Dukku and Balanga because they are the LGA our project currently running.
Because we might have few cases and because we are based in the state capital that is why we involved components of the people, like The International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) and State Security Service (SSS) the Police and other security agencies at the state level,” Mr Akpan said.
He said that the training is vital in reducing mental health caused by the trauma of rape and other GBV, “Because when a child is reaped it affects every fabric of that child. In these 2-days we want to see how we can galvanize the stakeholders in respect of counselling and what are the basic referrer pathways in terms of survival of this menace”.
When asked about the current situation of the Child Rights Act (CRA) in Gombe, Mr Akpan said, “We are calling on the government to expedite action in passing the CRA because it will go a long way to bring the perpetrators to book and on time”.
However, he explained that “currently the bill is before the House committee on women and the document has been shared with relevant stakeholders within the state. We were told that the document is to stay with them for a period of 30 days so that they will go through all the nitty-gritty and then they will be a public hearing.
“So, we are hoping that before the end of August that will be a positive outcome from that review by the several stakeholders,” Mr Akpan explained.
Psychosocial First Aid: SCI trains Gombe Community Based Organizations, others
