Ho,- Dr Gilbert Tietaah, a Communication Consultant, Communication for Development (C4D) has said designing an accurate and relevant media content targeting the debilitating effects of human trafficking on the victim, community and nation was as crucial as enforcing state laws to prosecute offenders.
He said unambiguous and straight to the point messages were enough to keep all actors informed, while creating wider channels to get to the audiences with tailor-made media content to inform and educate.
Dr Tietaah made these statements during a stakeholder Consultative workshop on ‘Combating Human Trafficking (HT) in Ghana towards a national Communication Strategy Diagnostic Phase in Ho recently.
The workshop was organised by the Human Trafficking Secretariat of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP), agencies whose responsibilities fall under HT including; CHRAJ, Social Welfare, the Police, Media, Chiefs and funded by Expertise France.
He said messages needed to be designed by a profile of audience, purpose, channels, information, and benefit and pre-test to determine effectiveness.
He said “a message is only as good as it has been received, understood and acted upon.
Dr Tietaah, also a Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, Legon said a good and effective message must be useful to the objectives accessible to the target audience, relevant to the needs and concerns, easy to understand, sensitive to cultural issues, beliefs and above all capture audience attention.
Content analysing media of Human trafficking, Dr Tietaah, said majority of reports were straight news stories with press releases and enterprise or feature stories completing a study over the period of 2016-2020 and sampling some 100 stories.
He said many headlines carrying the operational word HT, which signaled intent to give the reader immediate sense of issue as reprehensible and a practice to be repudiated.
Madam Abena Annobea Asare, Head, Human Trafficking Secretariat of the MoGCSP has said human trafficking could get out of hand if a collective decision was not taken.
She called on the media to set the right and positive agenda for the country by using the morning shows for constructive and nation building programmes, which she described as wayward.
She urged prosecutorial agencies to enforce the laws to the end and refrain from unwavering attitudes that frowned on getting justice for victims adding, Ghana was categorised as a source and transit destination for labour and sexual exploitation with the emerging trends of organ harvest to foreign territories being on the ascendancy.
She said combating human trafficking was a shared responsibility and asked all actors including; public and private institutions, traditional and religious organisations to play their mandated roles effectively by setting the agenda and making it topical as the only recipe’.
Togbe Adjatekpor VII, Osie (Paramount Chief) of Avatime Traditional Area said it behooved on all stakeholders to make human trafficking topical at all levels indicating “trafficking should be everybody’s business.”
He suggested that partnership should be prioritized in the scheme of the four ’P’ approach, namely, prevention, protection and prosecution to elicit support from a broad spectrum of platforms.
Serge Akpalou, Project Manager of Expertise France, stated that it was an important exercise to hear from stakeholders within the regions in the development of a national communication strategy.
He says: “Due to its holistic nature, we are hopeful that the consultative meetings will go a long way to develop a strategy that will prevent and address the menace of human trafficking in our communities.”
He also mentioned that the programme was carried out with funding from the European Union, and it was only the first of other consultative meetings leading to the development of the communication strategy.
Source: Ghana News Agency
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