The Students for Peace (S4P) in Lagos State University have been trained by two Civil Society Organizations to become advocates against Hate Speech and Online Violence against Women at WANEP, Ikeja Lagos on November 26, 2019.

The training which was aimed at educating the Students for Peace and also to enhance their capacity to raise awareness on hate speech and online violence against women in the school and surrounding communities, was organized by Centre for Information (CITAD) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), proudly supported by the United States Agency for International Development USAID and UKAID.

According to the Lagos Centre Cordinator, Nahima Ajikanle-Nurudeen in the welcome remarks noted that the training was designed in such a way that would help students understand and promote the need for an enabling environment free from hate speech and gender based violence. Nahima added that it would also provide the right knowledge to propagate communities, as students ambassadors and members for peace initiative.

After which a pre-assessment to determine current knowledge of participants on hate speech and violence against women online was conducted by Shazali Sanusi of CITAD.

Annabel Ugwoke, the Program Officer at NDI equipped participants with knowledge of Gender Based Violence (GBV), which she explained as a human rights violation, a public health challenge, and a barrier to civic, social, political, and economic participation. Gender-based violence (GBV) is violence that is directed at an individual based on his or her biological sex OR gender identity. It includes physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse, threats, coercion, and economic or educational deprivation, whether occurring in public or private life.

Annabel cited the United Nation’s Population Fund and the United Nations Women statistics, 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 women respectively, have experienced physical or sexualized violence in their lifetime. She added by proposing possible solution to GBV, which include, families should promote gender equality from their home and among their children, civic and social studies should be broadened in school to include GBV, ensure implementation of law of laws to equally protect rights of women and men, and also ensure adequate punishment of those who engage in GBV.

The session for Hate speech was ably facilitated by Hamza Ibrahim of CITAD, who enlightened participants on Hate speech and ways of identifying it, which include, examining the speech item to know if it dehumanize a particular group of people, persuading people to take violent action on persons of certain identity or locations, advocate discrimination, or does it ask people to beat, injure other people.

Hamza also gave supporting exercise to provide a foundation for the advocacy campaign, targets and strategies to access identified targets, after which the training ended by letting participants brainstorm on the treated sessions to come up with ideas to reach out to communities in order to conduct sensitization activities with the school and surrounding communities.

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