Justice Ajonye Perpetua – the acting president of South Sudan Law Society - Credit | Lou Nelson/Eye Radio - Jan. 21, 2022

A human rights activist has called on the ministry of interior to incorporate subjects of gender based violence into the syllabus of Rajaf police training college.

This, Justice Ajonye Perpetua – the acting president of South Sudan Law Society – believes will help educate the expected unified police officers on how to respond and handle cases of sexual and gender based violence, or S-GBV.

Sexual and gender-based violence refers to any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and is based on gender norms and unequal power relationships.

It encompasses threats of violence and coercion.

It can also be physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual, and can take the form of a denial of resources or access to services.

Such acts of violence inflict harm on women, girls, men and boys.

It is not clear whether the training center is offering courses related to GBV or not.

However, some survivors of such violence often complain that the police personnel ignore their conditions when they report.

For the last two years, Eye Radio has been reporting disturbing stories of women and girls being gang-raped by men with guns in Juba.

Some of the incidents include that of an 8-year-old girl who was gang-raped in Gudele, while a 58-year-old woman was also raped and killed in Jonderu residential area in Juba.

A woman was raped right in front of her two children, as they watched helplessly by armed men in the Gudele area.

In 2020, two more women were again attacked by armed men when they broke into a house in Jebel residential area, put everyone at gunpoint, sexually abused the women and looted properties.

The police claim that most cases of sexual gender-based violence are not being reported due to cultural believes and stigma.

In August same year, the Inspector-General of Police encouraged the public to report suspected cases of gender-based violence including rape to the nearby police station.

Some rape survivors have said police could not help them after reporting the matter, with some police officers questioning the accuracy of the testimonies.

This according to justice Ajonye is because the officers are not well taught and trained on cases of GBV.

She says there is a need to include comprehensive subjects of GBV in the police training centers.

“There has to be holistic training on GBV at the training college in Rajaf, police academy. GBV must be a full subject which can take months, Ajonye said.

“They have to be taught about it so that when they graduate, each police officer has an element on how to protect a victim or a survivor of GBV.

“The holistic way is to entrench the GBV into the curriculum of the police academy, it has to be entrenched. Once it is entrenched, it has to become a compulsory subject and mainstreamed.”

Justice Ajonye went on to urge the police leaderships in all the states and the three administrative areas to allow – the already trained GBV police officers – perform their duties in their respective stations without interference.

“There were already trained police officers in the gender desk, but the issue is, when partners support them at the desks, shortly the leadership will change them away from that location of the desk,” Ajonye told Eye Radio.

“You need to have people whom you have to be consistent with so that the process becomes durable and sustainable, and that is the biggest challenge.”

Ajonye stated that both the South Sudan law society and the ICRC have documented 4,000 abuses of GBV in South Sudan.

This was between February and July 2021.

The South Sudan Penal Code states that whoever commits an offence of rape upon conviction shall be sentenced to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years and may also be liable to a fine.

But human rights groups say perpetrators of rape and Gender-based Violence have largely remained unpunished.