It was at the City Council Auditorium! A conversation on sexual and gender-based violence unseen anywhere in Sierra Leone in the last fifteen years! Those who hold expertise in the subject-matter, those who are at the frontline of gender activism, those who initiate policies and formulate laws related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), those who advice the President on issues as these, and those who institute arrest of perpetrators of SGBV took part in the confabulations, answered questions concerning their care or neglect, and faced public reprimand concerning some inadequacies in the fight to tackle a menace that has caused unsolvable damage to many survivors and that has ended lives of many sprouting, promising souls.

Chernor Bah! He facilitated the town-hall. Minister of Information and Civic Education! He did not appear exuberant nor was he garrulous on the subject-matter. But he was passionate and pertinacious about tackling an infestation that appears to be emitting dark shadows on the prosperity of a nation whose children are entangled in a battle waged to ravage their prosperity, desolate their hopes, hide their identity – and in extreme cases – end their existence on earth. He said: “I am a father with boys and girls. When I see them – each time I look upon their faces – when they smile and laugh, it tells me that they have eaten; when they play and jolly, it tells me that they are well and healthy; when they argue and challenge each other over some fatuous things, it tells me that they are in school; and when I watch them sleep at night in the uncomfortability of the petite comfort we can provide them at home, reminds me of my responsibility in parenting. And so do you! You are the first security to your child. Let us take that up first, and then turn to government for the rest! The assumption I make is that we are here today to dialogue with government and understand our roles in the battle.”

His long pause reinforced a dramatic silence that overwhelmed the hall – drowned in guilt, perhaps. And at the front row of the hall climbing onto the back, the expressions on their faces – those women, those mothers, those advocates – echo an unfortunate neglect in parenting that continues to expose children to harm while government is reproached for the same inattention at home.

Daniel Kettor, Head of Rainbow Initiative, drew attention to the compromise of sexual offences which may be an outcome of poor parenting. Without doubt we know parents compromise their responsibility: they fail to perform routine checks on their kids; fail to ask probing questions; fail to pay attention or listen to those ‘big man or big woman talk’ their children tell them as they attempt to talk about an ‘encounter’; fail to pay attention to signs, appearances, and body language of their children; and often will want to smack them as they try to complain of some erotic touching of their genitals by an intruder within or outside the family. For Daniel, this trend has contributed significantly to underreporting abuses.

in Dispatch No. 565 entitled: Gender-based violence a high priority in Sierra Leone, but citizens say it is a private matter published by AFRO BAROMETER in 2022 indicates that a majority of Sierra Leoneans (57%) say domestic violence should be treated as a private matter to be resolved within the family rather than a criminal matter requiring law enforcement to get involved. This makes the situation dicey and continues to increase societal displeasure for talking about it, about what M’Cormack-Hale and Twum (2022:7) describe as a complex problem with its own complex and evolving attitudes.

Gender Adviser to president Bio raised the seriousness of gender-based violence and stressed the level of prevalence across the country in pre-2018 and right up to 2020, where it appeared girls as young as five-year old could face attack of sexual violence even by their own guardians or family members, where rape was exercised to subjugate and terrorize women, where law enforcement agency appeared to be part of the problem of maintenance a structure tolerant to such abuses, where the traditional system – with its powerful paraphernalia of native artistry of wizardry – placed constraint on investigations, and where shame and stigma would compel survivors to remain in perpetual silence and hiding.

For Isatu Kabba, a break from that ghoulish horror defining Sierra Leone arrived with the declaration of rape as a national emergency in February 2019. According to Martin and Koroma (2021); and Sierra Network Salone (2020), Sierra Leone passed the Sexual Offences Act in October 2019 and established the Sexual Offences Model Court marking a new dawn in the battle against SGBV.

While there is a general view that a renewed attack may have been unleashed by those who carry penchant appetite for gender-based violence, by those who grab the slightest moment to exert a dominance to tear flesh, open conversation like the National Town-Hall on SGBV held in July, 2024, appears to unshackle the mystery placed around it and abolish a societal verdict of permeating silence about it. The elements of shame and stigma involved in this kind violence are enforcing the taboo around SGBV and causing the silence. A woman raped either in the city or village is unwilling to talk about it, and as along as she is domiciled in that community, it becomes a collective effort to defend her through that protection of community silence and masking. She is hidden from the world. Conversation is largely on sexual penetration. In this circumstance, the shame and stigma tend to shift to the parents, to the family. Yet, it does not take away the timidity of the kid in school, and the ignominy that hovers around that child through reprimanding eyes from colleague pupils, who scotch their counterpart with those looks at every footstep taken.

Sexual penetration, for what we know, can leave tracks of intractable injuries in the children we call our beacon. Our girls may suffer laceration in their genitals that will doom their happiness throughout their lifetime. Our boys cannot escape this attack. They can suffer a penetration that can obliterate the passage they use to ease bowel stress. So, both boys and girls are unsafe.

In the last one year or so, there has been a recrudescence of SGBV in parts of Sierra Leone: in Kambia a security personnel allegedly penetrated nearly eleven children – boys and girls; in Pujehun a cleric is on the run for penetrating a thirteen-year-old girl; in Kailahun where Jebeh died in morbid circumstances leaves the district in rage; and in Freetown where Sia Fatu Kamara succumbed to a dominance which reinforced the turgidity of the brutal force that claimed her life attempts to unmask a catastrophic prevalence planted in the substructure of a Freetown society that pays less or no attention depending on the status of who is involved either as a victim or an ‘executor’. It is not uncommon the act of sexual predatoriness in Freetown – and the executors are highly stationed such that an accusing finger pointing at them risked being faced with a double-coated barricade plotted by the very society which pretends to care in some instance. One face of the barricade launches a formidable retaliation which demonizes the accuser. The other exhibits a wardrobe of the altruistic gestures of this social Samaritan who pays school fees for many, who buys Okada for many, who doles out microcredit to traders, who offers jobs to the youths, who pays medical bills for the sick. A long list of philanthropic work! Donation of grades in schools and colleges is also part of the benevolence to veil sexual subjugation.

This is why we must not stop talking about SGBV and taking the necessary action to tackle it. I know the First Lady has made impressive contributions in championing rights, welfare, and hygiene of women and children; Gender Adviser had spoken about significant intergovernmental collaboration with local and international actors and reactivation of taskforce; Minister of Gender and Children’s Affairs had spoken about safe homes; Acting Chief Justice had intended for more special courts on SGBV; Inspector-General of Police had pledged commitment to increasing and speeding investigations; and the public had called for more engagements to mobilize public support for public action geared towards reporting offences and supporting survivors and mounting community campaigns led by men to eradicate this pestilence.

This is my humble contribution – writing. I remain Alimamy Lahai Kamara.