By Kemo Cham
The Sierra Leone Government is working on the establishment of a database for convicted sex offenders as a means of protecting girls and women from sexual abuse.
Every individual who is convicted of sex offense will be registered and their details stored in a national sex offender registry, an official told Politico.
This move is part of the implementation of a commitment by the government to open up its governance system and make it transparent, one of eight commitments made in its National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership (OGP).
Kalilu Totangi, Chairman of the National Council for Civic Education and Development (NaCCED), which is running the OGP in the country, said the sex offender registry is a demonstration of the government's commitment to tackling the high rate of sexual abuse in the country.
"We know the emergency we face with issues of rape and the violations of women and girls, we have committed the government to keeping a database of violators and to make sure that we know who they are and where they are, so that we can make sure that we keep our young girls away from them," Totangi said in an interview.
A sex offender registry is a system designed to allow authorities to keep track of the activities of people who have been convicted of sex offense, including those who have completed their criminal sentences. The registry include details such as names, addresses, photographs, fingerprints, and DNA samples of the registered convicts.
Various countries have different approaches to keeping a sex offender registry. Some will require details like residential address notification requirement. That is, a sex offender will be required to notify the authorities whenever he or she moves to a location within the jurisdiction.
Discussion on the implementation of this commitment is ongoing by a steering committee for the OGP set up by NaCCED, comprising eight government institutions and eight civil society organizations. Totangi said only convicts would feature in the database which would be made accessible to the public through a national data portal.
Sierra Leone will become one of only 10 countries in the world that keep sex offender registry, when it complete the implementation process. The other countries, mostly in the developed world, include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Sierra Leone will be the second of only two countries in Africa in the list, after South Africa.
India is the latest of the nine countries that also included Australia and Trinidad and Tobago to join the club. India began its sex offender registry in September 2018.
But unlike in the other countries where the public can access the database, in India it can be accessed only by law enforcement agencies.
In Sierra Leone the plan is to make it accessible to the public, according to Totangi.
NaCCED was established by a presidential proclamation in 2018 shortly after the swearing in of President Julius Maada Bio. He said he wanted to use the institution to educate the masses and equip them with information relevant to enable them participate in the national development process.
Besides Civic Education, NaCCED has seven core programmes, including the OGP, which is an adaptation of the former OGI [Open Government Initiative] established by the Ernest Bai Koroma administration.
The OGP is a global platform comprising 78 countries and set up by former US President Barack Obama for countries committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens to collaborate.
Other commitments contained in Sierra Leone’s National Action Plan include access to justice, fiscal transparency, open contracting, and open climate change data. The sex offenders registry falls under the larger commitment of addressing Gender and Sexual violence against women.
Sierra Leone has for a long time had high rates of sexual and gender based violence incidences, but they reached astronomical levels in the last few years, especially between late 2018 and early 2019, prompting the Bio administration to declare a state of emergency on it.
The government has since fast-tracked a long delayed amended sexual offenses Act which has been passed in September. It toughens the punishment for offenders, including imposition of a life sentence on convicts found guilty of sexually abusing minors.
Besides providing technical support to boost the data collection effort of the Family Support Unit (FSU) of the Sierra Leone Police on sexual offences, NaCCED will also use its platform to sensitize the masses about what is in the law and the content of its commitments.
“Every year the FSU takes data, but this data is not collated. They don’t add the level of urgency that we want around that data collection. So what we have said, together with the FSU and Justice Department, is that we are going to help them to have data on all of the violations. So we now know who is accused and when somebody is accused we would not put it there until somebody is found guilty,” explained Totangi.
He added: "If somebody is found guilty, it is in the public interest to know that [they] have been found guilty for sexual violation or penetration as it were."
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