209 child rape cases in 9 months

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Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre coordinator Shamima Ali speaking during a sports webinar. Picture: SCREENGRAB

There have been 209 incidences of child rape survivors over the past nine months, says Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre coordinator Shamima Ali.

Speaking during a sports webinar organised by Team Up, an Australian Government program that champions inclusion and safe sports, Ms Ali said the sta

tistics were indicative that people now reported cases of child sexual abuse.

“In Fiji, we do have a lot of awareness now mainly because of organisations like ours, and right from 1984, we’ve talked about child sexual abuse,” she said.

“We have very good data coming out of the Office of Director of Public Prosecutions, Social Welfare and so on. From our data, from 2016 to 2021, we dealt with 225 child rape survivors from the ages of two to 17 years old.

“Most of the perpetrators were family members and only about 4 per cent were strangers.

“I was looking at our latest stats, so that was 225 over a five-year period but the latest stats from January to September of the last nine months alone, we have seen 209 child rape survivors so that is quite a huge jump.

“What is good is we don’t believe it’s increasing, neither here nor in the Pacific, but there is more awareness and reporting of it.”

She highlighted that Fiji had strong laws in relation to child protection laws, however, more could be done to strengthen implementation of such laws and policies.

“I think Fiji is quite ahead in child protection and far ahead than other countries. We have child protection laws and a child protection unit within the Ministry of Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation.

“There are welfare officers that are very dedicated but implementation and recognition of risks is very low, and we don’t realize the risks until we see the data.”

She also said the “conspiracy of silence” to protect perpetrators was rampant in the country and this often enabled the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children.

“It is such a norm to discipline children, and we all grew up like that, therefore it’s OK to beat them up so that is a difficult one.

“There is a lot of emotional abuse we don’t recognise and then the sexual abuse, which is the big elephant in the room all the time.

“No one wants to touch that one, that’s the difficult one and one of the reasons why we see that throughout the region, Fiji included, is that most of the perpetrators are known to the child.

“Often they are family members so there is a huge conspiracy of silence, protecting the perpetrator and often it’s the patriarch or someone very important so it is not talked about.”

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