JACOBABAD: A 16-day advocacy campaign against gender-based violence kicked off, and will continue till December 10, was said by members of the Community Development Foundation Jacobabad during a press conference, on Sunday.
Members of Pakistan Forum for Democratic Policing (PFDP) Sindh chapter, supported by VSO and Amplify Change in collaboration with Rozan and Legal Rights Forum, launched the campaign aimed at preventing gender-based violence through democratic policing.
The campaign, titled My Police For Me, focuses on raising public awareness of gender-based violence and reasserting the police’s commitment to tackling it, as a way to strengthen community-police ties, and work to build a positive image of a police force working to serve the needs of the community.
“Throughout the 16 days, we will host activities across Sindh in conjunction with the police, Sindh Human Rights Commission, Sindh Commission on the Status of Women and various educational institutes that will stimulate discussion, provoke debate and hopefully affect change around the topic of gender-based violence, particularly in terms of the police response,” organisers of the campaign said.
A diverse number of activities including seminars, dialogues with policy makers and police officers, theatre performances, community visits to police stations, police and community cricket matches, audio and video messages on community policing and zero-tolerance attitude towards gender-based violence and engagement with students at colleges and universities, will take place in different towns and cities.
The organisers emphasised the need for police reforms in Sindh, and said that community policing was the best policy and maintained that the police must serve in the interest of the community to bridge the gap between the community and police and increase dialogue between the two. They demanded a zero-tolerance attitude and effective police response to genderbased violence.
During the press conference, they maintained that the police should be sensitised on laws related to women, girls and children especially on gender-based violence in order to make them more responsive to the complaints of the victims of crime.
They asserted that if more females were to in police department, women will feel more comfortable in coming forward to report gender-based crimes. They encouraged police to recruit more female officers, in line with the 10% recommendation.
They said that police appointments and recruitments must be made on merit while more resources should be allocated to the police and it should be independent and empowered to make decisions and strategies that are in favour of the public as well as of police department as a whole.
Published in Daily Times, November 27th 2017.
