Restore hope to sexual abuse survivors in Zambia

Workshops

What we did

We facilitated a total of six workshops in different local communities, 4 in Lusaka in semi urban communities comprising youth and women. In each sitting we had 10 women (totaling to 20) and for the youth we had 10 in one sitting and 15 in another (totaling 25).  In Chongwe, which is a rural community we had a group of 10 women and 10 youth. The main purpose of these workshops was to help these communities understand/ identify the different forms of abuse and know the importance of safeguarding in any institution. In these workshops we looked at 5 different forms of abuse in the context of the church, these are Financial Abuse, 2.Physical Abuse, 3.Emotional/Psychological Abuse, 4.Spiritual Abuse and 5.Sexual Abuse. We also defined what safeguarding is and its importance. 

  It was interesting to see how many of the participants in the youth groups acknowledged that abuse is real yet they did not know exactly what it looked like. Some mentioned that they have seen abuse happen and have been victims of abuse in the church but did not know that they were being abused because of how it happened. “These are people who have seen us grow so we respect them and don’t regard some of their actions as abuse, especially the unwanted body contact and inappropriate sexual remarks” said one of the female youth in Lusaka. Another shared that “when you are asked to do some manual work by one of the elders of the church saying they will pay you and then they give you work beyond your capacity then refuse to pay; you just suffer in silence because they are your elders. “

When we were discussing some of the possible causes of abuse, particularly sexual abuse as it is the most common, there was a strong misconception from both the women and youth groups that indecent dressing was the main cause why sexual abuse was happening.  Some of the women shared that desperation was one of the contributing factors of abuse. They said “because women are desperate for many things in life like marriage, children (for those that have problems with childbearing), employment etc. they easily become gullible and perpetrators take advantage of this.”

The concept of safeguarding was new to most of them, while others mentioned that there are some policies in their churches regarding how abuse should be handled if it happened though very vague. We took the liberty to explain what safeguarding is, why it is important and what it may look like in their different settings.

Impact

By the end of the workshops, the participants understood that keeping silent about abuse is not a sign of respect. Most of them were confident that now they were equipped to point out when abuse happens. The misconception of indecent dressing being a cause of abuse was challenged by explaining to the participants that it is not true otherwise we would not have victims from other communities who dress conservatively and among children.

We got very good engagement from the groups with most of them wanting to learn more about safeguarding and reporting processes. We hope to return with further workshops focusing on how to identify abuse, reporting it and developing safeguarding policies.