By Taban Tom Henry
At least thirty female prison officers were trained by UNMISS on gender responsiveness in Torit, Eastern Equatoria State.
The UNMISS Correction Advisor Hillary Sengabo says that the objective of the training is to equip female prison officers with knowledge to facilitate prisoners to be rehabilitated and transform criminals to be normal citizens.
“the training today is about gender responsiveness in prison system and all that we are supporting is the capacity building for the prison service personnel to have that requirement of knowledge to facilitate prisoners to be rehabilitated to reform and transform the criminals to be a normal citizen.”
So today we are trying to make them understand gender equality among the prison officers and also among female prisoners so we expect that these 30 participants being dominated by female prison officers that are going to work as exemplary and also try to train their colleagues who have not come here so that they can also have this gender sensitivity in their daily routine work,” he said.
The UNMISS Correction Advisor mentioned that UNMISS have been training prison officers especially on prison record management and Mandela Rules in Eastern Equatoria State.
He however applauds the prison authorities for recruiting both female and male prison officers citing that female prison officers have the duty to escort female inmates.
“This is the first training of its kind, we have been training in other discipline like in prison record management, Mandela rules but this is the training that has tackled about gender maybe they have been receiving other trainings from the government but on the side of UNMISS this is the first time we have trained them but we hope to continue training them. Since that the prison authority have manage to recruit female and male simply because they have different duties depending on what to do because we expect that female inmates are being escorted by female prison officers and also kept in detention wing specifically being watched by female prison officers,” he added.
The Director General of Prison Service in Eastern Equatoria State Major General Ceaser Tombe Joseph stated that the training will help prison officers updated because many prison officers were working without human rights regulations.
“It is important because it is being updated, why I say it is being updated because people were working without regulations or without being supervised by human rights but currently many of the work are being done according to the regulations and the law because there are laws for children and gender so we are trying to give capacity our people with knowledge on how to deal with the gender in the prison according to the law and human right system so it is very important for our people to acquire knowledge of gender based violences,” Ceaser said.
The speakers made these remarks to Radio Emmanuel in an Exclusive interview.