- as YMCA empowers sex worker in Lagos
Published By Adeola Ogunlade
Health Rights Officer, Legal Aid Council of Nigeria, Grace Adenubi, has called for more vocational and life skills support for sex workers especially underaged girls so that they can lead a normal life.
Adenubi said this at the Youth Justice and Dignity Project organised by Young Men’s Christian Association held at the Obalende roundabout, Lagos.
Tagged: Talent Hunt for Sex Workers: Resilience against Negative Peer Pressure. The event brought together sex workers from around Suya in Obalende. The programme featured seminal, dancing competition, counselling and talent hurt. The winner of the talent hurt will undergo a free vocational training supported by YMCA.
She said that Nigerian law does not legalize commercial sex work, and the profession is viewed as exploitative and a form of violence against women.
She stated that many sex workers are vulnerable to high incidence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and other life-threatening diseases.
Adenubi noted that the need for increasing support from the society to sex workers in a way that will help empower their mind toward productive and positive ventures is urgent.
She went further to cautious sex workers against drugs abuse and violence activities that can land them into undesirable end.
She assured them of legal aid support on any criminal cases instituted against them wrongly, adding that they must not err on the side of the law as there is no ignorance before the law.
Earlier, in his words, The Zonal Coordinator of Youth Justice and Dignity Project, Olukayode Ogunyemi, said the project was aimed at helping youths to understand the law and avoid running afoul of it.
He said many youths in Correctional Centres do not have any business being there.
Most of them, he said, are there because they contravened the law by being careless.
He said empowering young people with the right information and to become productive citizens was very germane.
Ogunyemi said: “We want to shift the focus of vulnerable youths which include: bus conductors and sex workers to something more productive for themselves, their families and the nation.”