By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
The campaign group, Center for Accountability and Rule of Law (CARL), has called for a special budget to be developed by the Sierra Leone Police for the Family Support Unit (FSU). CARL said this will help the capacity of the FSU to tackle Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV).
The FSU is a unit in the Police force that is responsible to investigate and prosecute SGBV related cases, among several other functions.
“We believe that the FSU should have a separate budget from the budget of the Sierra Leone Police, because when you throw it into the main budget the executive body of the Police may decide to use it otherwise,” Executive Director of CARL, Ibrahim Tommy said.
“[In] 2021 they should have a separate budget line, that will even help us to track when funds are disbursed,” he added.
The call for a separate budget comes exactly on the day when the policy hearing for the 2021 budget started. The latest call by the rights group comes following the release of a new study it did on the police unit.
The study which was funded by Trocaire covered 55 FSUs across five districts in the country: Western Area Rural and Urban, Bombali, Kambia and Port Loko.
Some 12 monitors gathered data for the research and the focus was on six key areas; Records Management, Infrastructure, Staff Strength, Means of Transportation, Stationary and Equipment, and Budget.
The study found out that only 10 out of the 55 FSUs surveyed had a comprehensive data on SGBV cases covering the last three years.
“There is no electronic database management systems in nearly all FSU posts surveyed; information is recorded manually. Only the North-West Regional FSU office has an electronic (computer-based) data management system,” Communications Manager at CARL, Isata Sowa, said during a press briefing on Thursday.
Other worrying revelations were that officials in 45 out of the 55 posts said they didn’t have adequate staff, whiles 30 out of the 55 said they didn’t think their personnel had enough skill and knowledge to address incidents of SGBV.
The rate of SGBV has been so alarmingly high in recent years that it prompted President Julius Maada Bio to declare a state of emergency on rape last year, which led to a review of the relevant laws. But campaigners say much more needs to be done by the government. Some of these are captured in the CARL report.
The data in the organization’s latest study also showed that FSUs have significant constrains with mobility. Motorbikes are the most common means of transportation at most FSU posts, according to the report. But even with that, the findings showed that only 24 of the 55 FSUs have functioning motorbikes and none of those 24 posts have received any funding for maintenance of those bikes.
“Imagine you have an FSU post without any motorbike, what do you do when there is a case to be investigated? There is a good chance that the police officers will ask the victim to pay for the transportation of the perpetrator,” Tommy said.
“And motorbike is not even the ideal means of transportation, because if an officer arrests a suspect, how do you transport him?” he added.
An underlying problem that is responsible for most of the problems that were found by this study is that since 2017, none of these 55 FSU posts have received funding from government.
“A lot of them depend on NGO intervention; for example, our office in Makeni provides stationery support once in a while to the FSU post in the area,” Sowa said.
The Police force budgeted Le320 million for FSU operations across the country in 2020. The findings are a shocking indictment on the leadership of the force regarding their efforts to tackle SGBV.
Fatmata Daboh, the head of the FSU told Politico in a brief telephone interview that while there are no special funding for the unit, they have always had support from the police leadership.
“All I know is that we don’t have a special fund but the IGP and the Police Board have always supported us when we want to investigate any case,” she added.
“The IGP is very committed to the FSU,” she added.
CARL said they will continue their advocacy to ensure more funds are allocated and that the funds reach FSUs across the country to ensure victims get access to justice.
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