Campaign to retain boys in school needed
The Deputy Director of the Judicial Reforms and Project of the Judicial Service, Ms Gifty Nyarko, has called for deliberate efforts to encourage the boy child to also complete school.
She said the campaign to get the girl child to school seemed to have caught on well but to the detriment of the boy child.
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In a presentation at a training in gender-based violence for staff of the circuit courts in the Ashanti Region, Ms Nyarko said “we should start highlighting the issues about the boy child dropping out of school,” cautioning that care should be taken to avoid creating inequality between the sexes.
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Ms Nyarko proposed that the gap could be bridged by using the same campaign that got the girl child emancipated.
According to her, the pressure on the boy child to be economically empowered has made them susceptible to all sorts of manipulation “and the boys are being lured into activities that bring money” and cited the ‘Sakawa’menace as being a by-product of these societal pressures.
“So there should be a campaign that targets the boy child and encourages boys to go to school, stay in school and complete their education,” she urged.
Training
The training, funded by the Danish Embassy, was to sensitise the staff of the courts to be gender-sensitive and to know how to deal with the various cases of gender-based violence.
It was also to make the staff more adaptable to the current issues and open them up to understand the relationship between the court and the victims.
The participants were drawn from the circuit courts in the Northern Sector of the Judicial Service and the Western and Central regions.
Capacity building
The Supervising High Court Judge of the Ashanti Region, Justice Kofi Akrowiah, underscored the importance of capacity building and urged the participants to make good use of the training to upgrade themselves in gender-based violence issues.
Noting that in this country, gender-based violence seemed to have some cultural antecedents, Justice Akrowiah stressed the need to sensitise the collaborators at the forefront of confronting this socio-cultural problem.
The training, therefore, he said, formed part of the coordinated efforts by the service to get its staff ready and prepared for the task.
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