Journalist takes up battle against violence on women

Eugene Ngalim, a Journalist by profession, has taken up the fight against violence on women in Cameroon.

This was during a workshop that took in Limbe on Wednesday, November 12, where over 30 participants were tutored on the virtues needed to understand a woman. The participants were equally told that battering and other forms of violence on women are crimes punishable by the law.

“Considering the fact that more than 70 percent of violence meted on women is usually done by the men, we came here to brainstorm on the strategies men can put in place in order to end violence on women and the girls,” he said.

Ngalim, CEO of an NGO, the Cameroon Youth and Students Forum for Peace, CAMYOSFOP, said the strategy they were trying to put forth was to stem the violence women and girls suffer in the hands of their male counterparts.

According to a 2013 WHO study on violence against women conducted in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council, Africa tops the chart with a 45.6 percent for combined intimate partner and non partner sexual violence on women.

On intimate partner violence, countries such as Cameroon, Botswana, Lesotho, Liberia, DR Congo, South Africa, Namibia and ten others have a 36.6 percent prevalence rate.

WHO’s Director, Dr Margaret Chan, in the study, holds that “these findings send a powerful message that violence against women is a global health problem of epidemic proportions.”

According to the study, violence against women often result to grave health consequences such as deaths, miscarriages, broken bones or other injuries, depressions, unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Based on the above scenario, Ngalim through his NGO, with the support of the UN Women in Yaounde decided to pitch battle against this ill in Cameroon which WHO considers as a global health problem that needs to be tackled by every country.

According to Ngalim, the strategy of trying to use boys to impart the need for non-violence against women was based on the fact that the boys are still young and can adhere to new doctrines than the men. He said though the men to men approach has worked in other countries like Kenya, the boys can better convince their peers than grown up men who might still be too culturally held back by the notion that the man is superior to the woman.

Ngalim said his NGO plan to set up a network across the country where the message of non-violence against women will be propagated to ensure that Cameroon reaches a level of zero tolerance to violence on women.

Meanwhile, in her presentation on “Balanced Communication within the family, Doris Mbah, said “partners leaving together must cultivate the habit of communicating effectively among themselves. This will go a long way to prevent misunderstanding.”