Ministry of Defense Enhances Sexual Gender-Based Violence Awareness Training among Army Personnel in Voinjama

Lofa County: In a daring reform move, the Ministry of National Defense has initiated what internal actors now confirm to be a full-scale restructuring of military conduct, using Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) enforcement training at the Voinjama Military Barracks as the launchpad for a command-wide cultural reset.

By: Abraham Sylvester Panto

Far from a basic sensitization campaign, the operation marks the beginning of a policy recalibration designed to confront, dismantle, and criminalize institutional silence, complicity, and internal cover-ups of sexual abuse within Liberia’s Armed Forces.

Phase II of the SGBV campaign, executed through the ministry’s Department of Gender and Social Inclusion (DGSI), was crafted as a mandatory compliance intervention, transforming gender awareness into a legal, operational, and leadership metric across all ranks.

Participants, ranging from battalion officers to military spouses, were systematically engaged in scenario-based interrogations, statutory briefings, and behavioral accountability sessions that redefined abuse.

At the core of the Voinjama exercise was the quiet rollout of a newly embedded monitoring regime: compliance trackers, anonymous audit tools, and direct-reporting mechanisms have been installed to document each command unit’s participation, attitude, and procedural follow-through on SGBV incidents.

Sources close to the training confirmed that these metrics will now feed into the officer vetting system, promotion pathway, and deployment readiness screening for peacekeeping operations and internal assignments.

For the first time in AFL history, military dependents, especially women and girls, were formally incorporated into the enforcement framework, signaling a strategic departure from past practices that viewed family-based abuse as a domestic or cultural issue beyond military jurisdiction.

The move seems to reinforce the ministry’s intent to expand the concept of military accountability beyond uniformed behavior.

The Defense Ministry has also introduced a structural clause that makes administrative silence or negligence in SGBV cases punishable under reinterpreted military ethical codes. Under this directive, commanders who fail to act now risk formal inquiry and career jeopardy.

By placing SGBV response on the same operational footing as arms accountability and battlefield readiness, the ministry has declared gender-based violence a national security issue, not a peripheral human rights concern.

Unlike previous training sessions that were donor-sponsored and performative, the Voinjama phase was implemented under a revised internal operations budget, with regional commanders instructed to allocate time, space, and human resources for execution.

Beyond the barracks walls, the campaign is expected to influence policy behavior within Liberia’s wider security apparatus. AFL’s new doctrine tends to treat SGBV as a frontline vulnerability eroding morale, erasing trust, and destabilizing command credibility.

The campaign’s next phase, scheduled for rollout at the Todee Training Base, will include trauma-informed judicial procedures, mental health recovery systems, and the formal deployment of barracks-based gender liaison officers, a step intended to permanently station accountability structures within the daily life of the AFL.