By Aminata Phidelia Allie
The Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law (CARL) last week released a damning report on the status of the Family Support Unit (FSU) of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) which reveals serious under-funding of the institution.
The FSU as a police unit handles matters relating to gender and sexual based violence which every study indicates is on a rapid increase in the country.
The report titled: ‘Assessing the Resource Gap in the Fight Against Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Is the FSU Hamstrung?’, highlights a number of challenges faced by the unit in its effort to adequately respond to sexual and gender-based crimes across the country.
The 32-page report reveals that out of 62 FSU stations nationwide, 32 are in the Western Area, eight in the Southern province and 11 each in the Eastern and Northern provinces.
Ideally, the report sates, every police station should have an FSU station. It points out the lack of finance for the unit, its personnel, equipment and accessibility of the FSU stations.
Only Le 4 million is allocated to the FSU yearly, the CARL study finds. This fund is even disbursed to the unit by the Police leadership on a quarterly basis of Le 1million (about US$ 200), making it difficult to serve its intended purpose for operational costs such as communication and stationery. As a result, officers working in the unit are forced to resort to using their personal call credits or ask victims or NGOs for money to establish communications or fuel their vehicles when they are involved in investigations.
CARL wants not just that the budget of the FSU be isolated from that of the SLP, but also increased.
The ideal running budget for the FSU should be US$ 30,000 monthly, the study notes.
In the area of personnel, the CARL report reveals that there were a total of 528 FSU officers employed at all the 62 stations across the country, an average of seven personnel working two shifts per station.
As at July last year, the FSU had only two vehicles in service, one at the headquarters in Freetown and one in Pujehun. It also had a total of 12 functional motorbikes nationwide - four in the Western Area, two in the South and six in the East.
“The Northern Province is particularly poorly equipped with no functioning cars and only one FSU station with a formal structure,” the report observes.
Furthermore, only 20 out of the 62 stations presently have assigned office spaces with appropriate storage facilities for confidential files.
The report recommends that the ministry of social welfare gender and children’s affairs should increase the number of social workers to at least two per station – preferably a male and a female. It also urges the government to increase the number of safe homes and magistrates and enforces the law on free healthcare services for SGBV victims, so as to discourage the practice of police doctors requesting for money before police medical forms could be endorsed.
The report emphasized on the need for the SLP to increase the number of FSU stations to at least one FSU station per police station and the number of personnel to at least 20 per station (10 per shift). It cites an FSU director saying a minimum of 20 officers per station (10 per shift) is required to have sufficient staff to handle the workload. It also pleaded with the FSU to implement a monitoring procedure to identify their problems.
CARL says the government must endeavor to create a conducive environment for the country’s women and girls by prioritizing issues of SGBV.
While commending the government for its creation of laws that sought to protect women and girls, CARL’s Executive Director, Ibrahim Tommy, noted that more needed to be done to capacitate relevant institutions like the FSU, for them to effectively deliver on their mandates.
Earlier at a separate but related programme, Tommy had observed that there was an astronomical increase in SGBV cases against women and girls.
“This paints to a grim picture about justice availability and its access for women and children. The children are an endangered species in this country,” he said, noting that the government was not doing enough to boost President Ernest Bai Koroma’s statement that violence against women was violence against the state.
© Politico 12/03/15
