The Office for the Protection of Gender, Children and Morals (Oprogem) presented the results of its fight against gender-based violence. More than 200 cases of rape were investigated by the courts last year in Guinea. A decreasing figure but the number of sexual violence, a real scourge in the country, remains largely underestimated.
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Even if the figures are down compared to previous years, Commissioner Marie Gomez, general director of Oprogem, estimates that the number of rape cases in Guinea “ remains worrying “. In 2023, 205 cases were recorded across the territory and referred to a court. Of this total, 100 cases concerned minor victims.
Despite everything, Commissioner Gomez welcomes the action of her services, present in the 33 prefectures of the country, particularly in raising awareness among communities. For the management of Oprogem, which toured the country last year, it is now the denunciations of rape that are exploding, and not the number of cases.
But these statistics are very undervalued. Commissioner Gomez acknowledges that cultural and societal factors continue to minimize the seriousness and criminality of rape. This is also the opinion of Maître Halimatou Camara, Guinean lawyer and human rights activist.
RFI: How do you react to the figures communicated in the Oprogem report?
Me Halimatou Camara: I don’t think these figures reflect the reality of things. Beyond questions of access to justice, there are questions of access to health. Most often, when a rape happens, when it has sometimes irreversible consequences, it is difficult to pursue a complaint because you have to seek treatment. I don’t think these figures reflect the reality of the phenomenon. I saw an interview with a women’s rights activist in Labé who said that there were twenty cases of rape in one month.
For the Labé region alone, that means that if we multiplied by twelve months, we would already be at this figure of 200 rapes…
So. So, what is clear is that today rape continues and the responses are not adequate.
Shouldn’t we strengthen the judicial system with more significant convictions? Rape, which is considered a crime in Guinea, is punished quite weakly…
As legal practitioners, when we look at all the rape cases that we handle, most often we see that there are judges, whether in Conakry or inside the country, who allow themselves to minimize the sentences when they are crimes. A few years ago, in one region of the country, a judge convicted someone who raped a 14-year-old young woman who was almost mentally defective. All the conditions for aggravation of the sentence, in any case all the aggravating circumstances, were met in this case and the judge had sentenced the person concerned to a sentence of four months’ imprisonment… Is this a problem of training ? Is it a problem of level or is it a problem of trivialization? It’s crazy. I think there is a training problem that arises, but there is also the fact that we are trivializing this crime, and this is found at all levels.