and other law enforcement agencies to handle gender-based and domestic violence. (Government, Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the Interior) • The Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development undertake awareness-raising programmes at state level to promote knowledge of the rights of women. Every effort should be made to mainstream gender issues in all national and state governance and development programmes. (Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development) • A legislative reform process by the Law Reform Commission be undertaken to ensure that laws not in conformity with the constitution, with CEDAW, with the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, and with recent progressive developments in jurisprudence regarding equality and nondiscrimination are amended to the extent of their inconsistency. (Government, Law Reform Commission, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development) • Civic education and awareness programmes be implemented that target the abolition of cultural practices that are discriminatory and harmful to women. (Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development and CSOs) OBJECTIVE 8: PROMOTE AND PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AND YOUNG PERSONS i. Summary of the CSAR 370. Nigeria acceded to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 19 April 1999 and has domesticated the convention at the national level. 371. In spite of international commitment to the rights of the child, the violation of children’s rights is still common. The dominant tendency in Nigeria is still to regard child issues as an essentially private, family domain in which external ‘interference’ by government or international factors is not encouraged. The CSAR further notes that a central issue in the contestations over the rights of the child in Nigeria is the question of the definition of ‘child’. There are two dominant perspectives – the formal, legal definition and the less formal, so-called community/cultural definition. More often than not, the two diverge. 372. The Child Rights Act of 2003 defines a child as a person below the age of 18 years. The various acts relating to children and young persons enacted by the former Eastern, Western and Northern regions variously see the child as a “person under the age of 14 years”, while ‘young person’ means a person who has attained the age of 14 years and is under the age of 17 years. Because of this contestation in the definition of a child in Nigeria, some states have not even passed the Child Rights Act. It has therefore been passed in only 11 states out of the 36 states as at 2006. 373. The legal definitions of ‘child’ have neither supplanted nor transcended the intuitive definitions offered by the different cultural traditions of Nigeria in which “a child is self-evident”. In situations of internal political violence and material poverty, Nigerian children, like their counterparts 127