Women’s Voice and Leadership in Ghana (WVL), an NGO, in collaboration with Women Initiative for Self Empowerment (WISE), a women and children advocacy group has held a day’s public education programme on Gender- Based Violence for media personnel in Accra.
Dubbed “Building gender responsive media to enhance public education on Sexual and Gender- Based Violence (SGBV) in the country”, the event was to brainstorm with the personnel on effective ways the media could help disseminate issues on SGBV for the public to appreciate the varying effective and canker it has on the victims.
In a presentation, the Executive Director for WISE, Ms Adwoa Bame, indicated that SGBV acts were criminal under the laws of the country, and as media practitioners, every news reports for public consumption must be in the right language and be out of hilarity .
‘It very demoralising when certain language, especially reporting defilement issues are aired in the local channels, the reporters sugar-coat it with humor just to create laughter and this takes away the seriousness of the act in itself’, she said.
According to her, with such a humorous reports, “the victim is often left traumatised with varying psychological issues leaving the culprit to walk about freely.”
The victim, she said, sometimes committed suicide or went into hiding due to the nature of information in the public which often might not be the factual information that led to the incident.
The Executive Director said the families of the survival were often left in a state of shock, accepting the real evidence of the act or what the public had been made to accept due to the humorous reportage.
She urged the media to, as a matter of urgency, fine a better ways of reporting the same issue or incident to draw home urgent need to eradicate such canker from our society.
BY VICTOR A. BUXTON
