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Knowledge and Incidence of Gender-Based Violence among Young Adults in the South-South Region of Nigeria: A Comparative Study

Background: Gender-Based Violence (GBV) entails fundamental violation of human rights and a violence that occurs due to normative role expectations attributable to one’s gender. It also includes all activities that facilitate an unbalanced power distribution between genders. These acts are likely to result in physical, sexual or emotional suffering which is usually meted out directly or indirectly through deceit, seduction, threat, coercion or any other means on the victim with the aim of intimidating, punishing or humiliating them. Methodology: The study was carried out in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States, South-South Region of Nigeria. A communitybased cross sectional and descriptive approach was used, incorporating qualitative and quantitative techniques. A total number of 426 copies of the questionnaire were administered to respondents by the research team. Analysis was performed on the received data from the questionnaires, using Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (SPSS). Results and Discussion: Majority of the respondents 343(83.1%) have heard about gender-based violence, with Radio/TV 214(51.8%) being the highest source of information. A greater population, 325(78.7%) accepted that maltreatment to a person on the basis of gender which can cause harm to him or her describes gender-based violence. The study further showed that 72.9% young adults could identify the various forms of gender-based violence. Analysis of responses revealed that 198(47.9%) young adults in the study area have experienced at least, one form of gender-based violence in their lifetime. Further analysis showed that physical violence 140(33.9%) and sexual violence 108(26.2%) were the most reported forms of gender-based violence experienced by respondents. Conclusion: The study showed a significant knowledge of gender-based violence among young adults, since 72.9% could clearly describe the subject matter. Despite this good knowledge, there was a high 47.9% occurrence of gender-based violence in the study area. Our findings and recommendations could impact GBV programming and policy decisions at the individual, community and national levels. Communities should be encouraged to work towards changing various narratives including the domineering attitude of men and encouraging female empowerment as these were linked to reducing incidences of genderbased violence. Campaigns to increase female education should be incorporated into the policies at the national level, as lower levels of education were associated with occurrence of GBV