The Gender Desk Officer at the Ministry of Social Welfare Gender and Children’s Affairs Bo, Alice Jeneba Koroma says that “among all the things to be done to women, sexual violence is the one that they find very hard to forget. And very hard to forgive.”
She stated this at a National Commission for Social Action reparation ceremony of 43 women who all went through various forms of sexual violence during the nation’s past ten years war.
She explained that when women go through abuses like sex, they find it very hard to walk out of the stress which she said was responsible “for most women not making it, after that experience.”
As for the wounded, she remarked that they “have long since healed but not those that were sexually abused.”
She went further to say that what makes the abuse very difficult to forget and forgive was that women who usually undergo this experience have people pointing fingers at them, in most places they go. Human beings, she said, were vulnerable at all levels but women are the most vulnerable. “Vulnerability is at all levels but we women are the most vulnerable.”
During her address, Hannah Koroma Coordinator Women Against Violence and Exploitations-WAVE-SL, accepted the assertion that “sexual violence is very hard to forget but what we should know is that we are not victims rather we are survivors” to which all the women cheered.
She went on to tell the women that “we however have to take that experience as a challenge to turn over to a new page.” Explaining her own ordeal in the hands of men, she stated that, “I have however taken that experience to become a new person and no one will look at me today and call me any names. We have to overcome the problems we have gone through as women. We have to move on. So let us take these challenges as opportunities.”
Going further, Hannah Koroma declared that “This decade is the decade of women.” She therefore implored the ‘survivors’ to be serious with “whatsoever you are doing, so that we become somebody by ourselves.” Indirectly speaking to the few men in the hall, she stated that “enough was enough” as she indirectly insinuated that “men are most times responsible for our woes.”
She therefore warned the women be very “wary of men, as you receive this money.” Men she said “would like to come near you now with sugar-coated words only to eat from that money.”
By Jenkins Bawoh
ADVERTISEMENT