Tackling Violence Against Women

Among the decisions reached at a two-day workshop on reducing violence against women and girls held recently in Port Harcourt by the Partnership Initiative in the Niger Delta (PIND) in collaboration with the Medical Women Association of Nigeria (MWAN), was the use of formal education in tackling violence against women and girls in Nigeria.
In their deliberations, participants at the workshop unequivocally asserted that violence against women and girls in Nigeria is a high rated social injustice which control the society is gradually losing grip of. They therefore, voted for an inclusion of it, into the education curriculum under the nomenclature of social justice education.
The choice of education curriculum for this task I supposed, must have been hinged on the understanding of education as a force with which to transform society and resolve social ills.
Before settling for the use of the curriculum to redress this injustice against the women folk, facilitators of the programme took time to highlight efforts already put by various concerned individuals, governments and non-governmental organizations to reduce if not outrightly stop violence against women and girls, among which are campaigns and sensitization programmes as well as calls for the education of the girl child so that she could wake up to her right and defend it according.
However, the inability of these avenues to curb this societal menace, gave birth to the call for the use of the education curriculum as the last straw, expected to break the camel’s back.
For the likes of Emile Durkheim, a renowned education theorist, such a decision would be adjudged to have been reached in error. This is so because Durkheim believes that education “is only the image and reflection of the society and can be reformed if the society is reformed. In short, education imitates and reproduces the society, it does not create it”, Durkheim posits.
But is Durkheim actually right in his thought about education as the out-put of the society that cannot be better than its producer? Durkheim is probably not alone in his world, many who are yet to come to terms with the exclusive power of education would continue to view it as a creation of the society that is only managed by the society so that only the true nature of the society can be mirrored  in it and nothing else.
Apart from the ability of education to transform an individual into a productive and independent adult, education is identified as a veritable tool in addressing societal ills. Paulo Freire, another education theorist, identified this attribute, when he called on educators to aggressively challenge both injustice and unequal power arrangements in the classrooms and society at large. His primary pedagogical goal was to provide the world’s poor and oppressed, with educational experiences that make it possible for them to take control over their own lives. Freire could achieve these because he believed that education provides possibilities and hope for the future of the society.
Education no doubt, remains instrumental in bringing about needed changes in the society especially when such need for change is emphasized from the foundational stage. For this reason, the school curriculum periodically undergo some reviews basically to incorporate identified societal needs with specifications on how they can be systematically addressed for better understanding and assimilation.
The choice of education via its curriculum to be used to address violence against women and  girls in Nigeria now, is quite apt, coming on the heels of killings, maiming, defilement and violations of various sorts for which women and girls have remained vulnerable. They are often the first to be attacked, yet the last to be protected if at all.
Recall that when the Acquired Imuno Deficiency Syndrome came ravaging the society, concerned minds were worried, brains stormed and the outcome was  the inclusion of sex education into the secondary school curriculum  so as to acquaint students with first hand information on safe sex.
In the same vein, the incorporation of social justice education into the school curriculum with specifications on assisting instructors develop a feasible change-oriented learning strategy will foster students’ understanding of the social issues underlying the human needs. This no doubt, will increase students’ awareness of the preponderance of violence against women and girls, identify the roles that individuals and institutions can play in addressing the anomaly

Sylvia ThankGod-Amadi