An unpopular opinion: Sierra Leone National Emergency on Rape

I am not as happy as everyone is about the National Emergency on Rape and sexual violence in Sierra Leone.

I hate to be the pessimist and I was just telling someone the other day when they messaged me about this issue and had similar sentiments as I did, that we must appear like quite the pessimists. We share quite an unpopular opinion. Ok let me speak for myself. I have quite an unpopular opinion on the president of Sierra Leone declaring a national emergency on rape and sexual violence. The ONLY thing that makes me happy about the wave of activism around rape and sexual violence among Sierra Leoneans and now this declaration by the President, is to see the possibility of attention being brought to this big issue and funding. This issue is not just unique to SL, but I am sure with the #MeToo Movement you can see that it is a problem. That happiness is small though as my country has not always done a good job of putting funds in the right place when it is being poured into a particular problem; see Ebola for example.

According to this CNN article and the MANY articles now circulating about this, the emergency was declared because of the rise in rape cases the past few years, especially on minors. I already addressed in my previous post why rise in REPORTING does not mean rise in actual cases. I feel like such an emergency should be evidence based because as a nation the general reasoning behind declaring a national emergency should be due to some very severe circumstances. If you look at most definitions of national emergencies it is usually used to address things TEMPORARY in nature, such as an environmental disaster. What this does then is divert a significant amount of resources to that problem.

With all of this I then wonder, what does this ACTUALLY mean in Sierra Leone? What is going to happen beyond what I keep hearing about harsher punishment for perpetrators? As I said in my previous post, we can’t assume the less reporting of cases will mean that this problem is solved. In fact I hold this unpopular opinion or unpopular sentiment of non-excitement because I actually fear that this will lead to less reporting, which means that things are going to happen a lot more in secret. Why? Because a lot of rape and sexual violence happens within families and people we are close to. There is more chance for people to be influenced to not report because of family pressure especially with the harsher punishment because such arguments such as “ay you want this person to spend their whole life in prison?” and for people like us, it is a hell yes, but if you don’t understand the mixture of emotion that happens around sexual abuse, then you won’t understand why this is an issue. With less reporting, we get into this thought that we should concentrate less on changing mindsets.

What this tells me is that perhaps in a few months when the number of reported cases is down, here comes the end of the emergency and a victory lap to say, “look at what we’ve done” and “look how successful we’ve been.” Again, I caution us to measure success beyond the reduction of reporting and see that as a sign of not being successful and use other measures. I want us to ask deeper questions. I’ve heard on the radio people saying things like “well e tan lek di more government day tok n people dem day tok di more rape day apen” (the more government talks and the more people talk the more it seems like rape is happening). The last few days I’ve been listening to Good Morning Salone on 98.1 and whenever rape cases are mentioned my taxi driver exclaims “ay well dis tin nor day woke o because the more punishment the more we day yehri case” (ahh well this thing is not working because the more punishment the more we are hearing about cases). For me this shows a lack of understanding from the every day person. We need to convey to people actually that this is good and not bad. This could also relate to the way the media is reporting the cases. There is a lot of sensationalism.

We need to focus! What are we advocating for? How are we measuring success? What is actually going to happen? All of this is not clear to me and I will keep ranting because as many of you know, this hits way too close to home for me to be silent. I hope someone somewhere is reading and will listen!