The West Nile regional police are set to establish a juvenile and Gender Based Violence (GBV) reception centre to combat the growing number of children who flee their homes in Arua and neighbouring districts.
The facility, which will be built at the Arua police station, is a donation from the humanitarian organisation Save the Children and will cost 192 million shillings.
Regional police authorities have been confronted with the challenge of a lack of a reception centre for the overwhelming number of GBV victims, but a sigh of relief has been breathed into the police by Save the Children with the assistance of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
While handing over the site at Arua CPS, Eddie Sserunjogi, the regional police commander of West Nile noted that this facility will relieve the police from the challenges of keeping stranded children and gender-based violence victims at police stations.
“Our police especially the office of Child and Family Protection Unit in Arua City have been facing struggling to keep children who run away from their homes, abandoned children, missing children, juvenile victims who are stranded, juvenile offenders, and GBV victims,” he said.
He revealed that such children usually come from within Arua city, districts within the West Nile region and beyond as well as from DRC and South Sudan.
In some cases, police said, officers from the child and family protection unit would keep the children in their homes to share the squizzed accommodation and food with the officers' family members, and some of the children would eventually disappear with the officers' property.
The RPC also observed that people who report to the office of CFPU are vulnerable and they often become stranded at the police stations and as such officers take them to stay in their homes to share their little space and food.
Sserunjogi promised that the police team would supervise the project regularly together with other officials from Arua City to ensure that the project runs smoothly without any problem and urged that there should be value for money.
