Today was a depressing day in terms of work. I spent the day going to each of the five district police offices in Juba. At each office there is a Gender Officer and an Office of Gender and Children that should deal with GBV cases and juveniles. It's a hypothetically promising model, with a Head Gender Officer also located at the Police Headquarters in Juba to coordinate the five district offices. I went with the Head Gender Officer, as well as the lead for the social work program at the Ministry of Gender and Social Development to check out the individual district offices and hopefully get some numbers on actual cases being reported. I was hoping to see how many of these cases progressed beyond complaints to the next step of following through with an arrest, and then being referred to courts. From there I hoped to learn how many of those resulted in convictions and if any did how long those prison sentences might be (or how large the fines were alternatively).
It turned out all my expectations of getting any data on case numbers was completely unreasonable. I'd figured the data would be circumspect, but what I wasn't prepared for was there to be no data. Only one of the five districts had kept any sort of records and I was only able to see one week of records, and there was no data on what happened once the complaints were filed. At most places the police officers I spoke to were not the actual Gender Officer, or even if they were, they did not distinguish between GBV cases and other criminal cases that involved women, meaning their numbers involved cases like thefts in which women had been complainants as well. That or they lumped any fighting of any type into GBV, so male-on-male fights were also included in this number. I also learned that unless the cases they saw were "high profile" such as rape, they did not refer the cases to court. Domestic violence cases for instance are handled and dismissed at the precinct, as one Gender Officer told me, they tell the husbands to bring the wives to the police station the next time they misbehave instead of beating her themselves. I'm not sure what they do with the women if the husbands do decide to being them to the police instead of taking care of it at home, but I imagine based on other reports I've read that it involves either a serious talking to about their wifely duties, or jail time.
The whole day ended up being exhausting, we hit five different district offices, including one where the police chief politely ignored us for more then a half an hour before the social worker marched us out of there. She was indignant about the wait, especially given we were ministry officials (or at least they are) and guests. We left without speaking to anyone, but I was proud of her for taking the initiative to walk out when she wasn't treated properly, especially because I wasn't going to say anything since it wasn't my place to decide what was acceptable or not. I'm not sure if we'll be going back out to that district to try again, or if our leaving was even noticed at all, but I'm glad they at least made a stand for themselves. It was also incredibly humid here today, it was only around 80 degrees, but my hair took a full three hours to dry in the humidity, and we spend a lot of it in ridiculous traffic (without an air conditioner) because of the Independence Day celebrations tomorrow. It's the second anniversary of South Sudan's independence, and I think every police officer in the city was directing traffic today or checking cars as they went by. It made for a couple of very long drives between police stations.
Anyways, despite the days frustrations it was helpful to determine what kind of shape the individual police stations were in, and it will make for some interesting writing in the final report I generate. I'm off to watch some television and relax a bit before bed, tomorrow should be crazy with all the Independence Day things going on. We're going in the morning to see the celebrations so hopefully I'll have some interesting goings-on to report back on after that.
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