COMBATING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE: COSI-BENIN INVOLVES JOURNALISTS IN THE FIGHT

02 Oct 2020 Cotonou, BENIN
Keywords : Benin Gender Equality Reports Youth Work - Organising And Workers Empowerment

On Friday, October 02. at the Labour Exchange in Cotonou, journalists were brought together with consultants and experts for a work of appropriation of the law in order to equip them on the contours of the 2011-26 law of 09 January 2012 on the repression of violence against women, to show them the difficulties of enforcing this law and its intricacies for better productions on the issue.

Cosi-Benin, the trade union confederation initiating the training workshop was represented by Calixte Adiyeton, program coordinator who declared that "Today, we cannot position ourselves on a subject as important and sensitive as the issue of combating gender-based violence without involving media actors who we expect to accompany us being well equipped. We used as a strategy a practical case to better simplify this law and allow media actors to assimilate and to better share it with readers and various listeners. What we expect from the journalists participating in this workshop is that they develop a certain sensitivity to gender-based issues of violence and see gender-based issues as a whole by taking the context elements that go with them and deal with them accordingly.”

Maifouss Nassirou, one of the trainers added: we also expect from them to invest enough in prevention through awareness so that acts of violence can decrease in our country.
From the questions asked by the participants, apprehensions arose. To the question of knowing what to do with these apprehensions, Calixte Adiyeton speaking on behalf of Noël Chadaré, the secretary general of Cosi-Benin replied: "There are actions to be taken within the editorial staff because the journalist is also a man in the midst of many constraints. As a trade union organization, we can help media players to, to a certain extent, free themselves from certain constraints. It will allow them to do the job better. Cosi-Benin will recover certain issues around which we can lobby the decision-makers so that today, a woman who is a victim of violence in our country, can really have all the support she deserves and also that this type of offenses to be punished."

The participants parted ways after discussions around ILO Convention 190 with the firm commitment to invest better than in the past through their media productions to lower the barriers of violence against women in the Republic of Benin.

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