Collective Action Magazine Edition 4. November 2023

INCONSISTENT AVAILABILITY OF SERVICES

RESEACH FINDINGS

Almost one third of respondents who identified as GBV survivors found “effective justice” to be equally “very helpful” (33.2%) and “unhelpful” (32,4%). Counselling and therapy emerged as the most helpful healing practice according to respondents (63,24%), who had indicated that they were survivors while all other interventions (ranging from 33% to 55%) were found to be very helpful, except for indigenous/traditional practices which were found to be helpful by only 5,5% of respondents. While counselling was indicated to be the most helpful of the healing practices listed, over 60% of respondents said counselling was not available in their communities. Complementary modalities as a group, including somatic therapies, yoga, meditation, homeopathy and animal therapy had not found widespread traction, but those who had tried them had found them to be useful.

Other notable findings

locally based helping services

01

Communities are pushing for locally based helping services and are asking for capacity building and “trust” to enable them to help their own people.

justice System

02

Effective justice is sporadic and

frequently unreliable,

breaking the trust of communities and reducing incident reporting.

multi-dimensional approach

03

Helping services seem to be sporadically and inconsistently

Effective healing at community level would need to incorporate prevention strategies, empowerment programmes and therapeutic services. A multi-dimensional approach is vital.

available throughout the country with a serious deficit in rural and semi-rural settings. A concern emerges particularly regarding counselling, which emerged as a favoured modality, but is not available in 40% of communities. Therefore, employing existing channels such as community- based organisations, a call for further counselling service providers, is a necessity to address this shortfall.

programming concerning men

04

A strong call exists for programming concerning men. Crucially this is seen as a preventative strategy to reduce GBV, but also as a healing process to support the healing of the many men who had been victims of sexual abuse in childhood.

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November 2023 | Collective Action Magazine

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