Nigeria: Girls Power Initiative

From AllAfrica:

A Non-Governmental Organisation, Girls Power Initiative (GPI), has called on the National Assembly to enact a law on violence against women.

The NGO also said the national assembly should stop debate on the Indecent Dressing Bill sponsored by Senator Eme Ekaette, saying the passage of the bill will increase violence against women.

The Co-ordinator of Calabar Centre of GPI, Professor Bene Madunagu, addressing the press in Calabar in reaction to the murder of Miss Grace Ushang in Maiduguri, Borno State while participating in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme said all Nigerians should condemn the death of the corps member.

Madunagu also expressed regret that the Director-General of the NYSC rather than condemn the rape and violence that led to the death of Ushang was blaming the late Corps member for not taking security precautions.

She said that at the public hearing on the Bill, it became obvious that the Bill proposes to "grant intolerably dangerous powers of arrest and invasion of the most intimate privacies of the woman's body imaginable to both police officers and ordinary citizens to undertake vigilante action against women they mere perceive to be indecently dressed".

According to Madunagu, "The compounded crimes that killed Grace Ushang painfully return our attention to the pervasiveness of violence against women in Nigeria and the growing resort to vigilante action to police vague notions of feminine propriety and decency".