24/03/2022
Ten Spanish police officers, five of them women, have traveled to the country to work on the project.
“One of the main obstacles facing the Lebanese community police – which is equivalent to the Spanish municipal police – is the low number of women on its staff,” says Joaquín Plasencia, chief inspector and director of the European project “Promoting Community Policing in Lebanon“, based in Beirut. Through this project, the FIIAPP is cooperating with the National Police to increase the number of women in the country’s police force, encouraging them to join and raising awareness of the benefits of the presence of women in the security forces for the protection of Lebanese women.
According to Plasencia, the burden of care borne by women in the country “makes it impossible for women to maintain both childcare and continuous work, so most of them are involved in administrative services during the morning hours from Monday to Friday”. In Lebanon, nearly four million people live in poverty, a figure that has doubled since 2019, according to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).
The increase in women is critical for the Lebanese police. The project manager admits that “the presence of women guarantees better protection, because one woman understands another much better, especially when she is a victim of gender-based violence or any other type of crime against her integrity.” To this end, some activities have been carried out to promote women’s interest in applying to the Internal Security Forces, apply a cross-cutting gender approach and promote gender-sensitive police policies to contribute to the principle of equality between men and women. This project also seeks to strengthen the country’s community policing to improve the service offered to the Lebanese population. It also aims to change the concept of “police force” to “police service” by adopting the best practices of the European Union in security sector reform.
One of the ten police officers who have been in the country since October is Guacimara Díaz Moreno, an officer in the prevention and reaction unit of the National Police: “my main mission here is to train operational units, but I also serve as a reference for those candidates who want to join operational units of the national police”.
The project is carried out in the framework of the EU-Lebanon Paternity Agreement (2016-2020) and is based on the Lebanese Internal Security Forces Strategic Plan (2018-2022) to ensure a more responsive, professional and human rights-friendly police service.
