The Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Hon. Mereseini Vuniwaqa officiated at the Klean and Brite Cleaning Services Futsal Championship at National Hockey Center in Suva. The championship was partially funded by the Ministry in support of the women’s futsal championship and despite the heavy downpour, Hon Vuniwaqa made time to meet with all the teams personally.
The theme of this year’s championship is ‘STOP CHILD ABUSE RIGHT NOW’. Minister Vuniwaqa emphasized the aim of the Fijian Government in addressing the issue of child abuse and neglect through policies and partnerships.
She also informed that according to statistics from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution in 2018, 38.9% of all sexual offences in Fiji were committed against children and 24.3% of all cases were where the victims and perpetrators were related or known to each other.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be desensitized by the frequency of these crimes nor allow this topic to phase out of our daily conversations. The Ministry is therefore grateful to the organizers of events such as the soccer tournament for using the platform to advocate against Child Abuse”, she said.
Hon. Vuniwaqa also highly praised the women’s team participating in the tournament. “As players, these amazing young ladies are already advocating for gender equality in the field of sports and I take my hat off to them”, she said. Hon Vuniwaqa also shared the same sentiments as one of the female players who said, “what they (men and boys) can do, we can do better".
Hon. Vuniwaqa acknowledged the Pacific Energy Limited and Gamerz Photography for sponsoring the Master’s Futsal and Women’s Futsal, all other partners, teams and officials for getting together on organizing the futsal championship with an important message to advocate on the issue of child abuse and promote gender equality.
Klean and Brite Cleaning Services Futsal Championship coordinator, Mr. Nadeem Mohammed said that this year 16 main teams, 8 Masters and 4 women’s teams participated in the tournament. The event was started in 2014 with only 5 volunteers led by Mr. Mohammed with $1000.00 in sponsorship.
Mr. Mohammed proudly stated that the event is growing since then and thanked the Ministry of Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation for the great partnership, which enables the event to take on a social issue each time. He has confirmed that the event group Pinnacle Events will now stage 2 events per year with the next one planned for September/October period and this event will offer the highest prize money in any regional futsal tournament so far and plans to work on increasing the prize money as well as women’s futsal to the next level.