Let’s quit feigning
ignorance about this benumbingly shameful fact. A vicious form of paedophilia
is rapidly creeping up on our country. Fathers have become the sexual predators
of their daughters. So has the neighbour; so has the employer; and so has the
admissions officer in our institutions. The cocktail of our national challenges
is getting progressively more complicated. Sorry.
And so, the girl-child, the mother of our
future presidents, governors, Senate presidents and 37 speakers of the federal
and state legislatures and justices faces a bleak future from the sexual trauma
suffered in childhood. She is condemned to carry the heavy burden of sexual
shame for life. Some of the abused girl-children find it difficult to live
normal lives after being so traumatised. It is horrible.
Paedophilia is not particularly strange to us
– as if that is any consolation. We are used to men preying on adolescents and
under-age girls. Our country, like other countries, is home to quite a good
number of evil and depraved and morally bankrupt men who prey on the girl-child
for their sexual gratifications. The Daily Trust of August 9, 2019,
published its investigative piece on the increasing cases of paedophilia in our
dear country. It found that “paedophilia
is on the increase in Nigeria (and that) it is gradually becoming a norm to see
media reports of cases of child rape and molestation. A growing trend shows
that the girl-child is mostly affected as men old enough to be their fathers
raped them, inflicting physical and emotional scars on their victims.” You
are not hearing it for the first time, I should think.
According to the newspaper, UNICEF reported in 2015 that “one in four girls and
one in ten boys in Nigeria had experienced sexual violence before the age of
18; and according to a survey by Positive Action for Treatment Access, over
31.4 per cent of girls said their first sexual encounter had been rape or
forced sex of some kind.”
The girl-child is regarded as the new sex
object who must willingly or unwillingly minister to the sexual demands of old
men, some of whom, ironically, have daughters within the age brackets of the
girl-child they love to ravish and whose future they have no qualms in
destroying.
And now, horror of
horrors, comes the father of the girl-child as her sexual predator, perhaps the
ultimate in the depravity of men in deficit of morality and a sense of
responsibility.
Last week, the police in Akure, Ondo State, arrested a 48-year-old man, Femi
Onifade, a welder. He was accused of defiling his two daughters, aged nine and
six years. I am afraid I am not man enough to repeat what the police alleged he
did to his two daughters. It is just too shameful. This sort of sexual
molestation of daughters by their fathers is becoming the norm in paedophile
cases in the country. Fathers rape their adolescent daughters and molest their
under-aged daughters, some of whom are literally in diapers. One man with a
straight face, once admitted to the police he had been sleeping with his
daughter because she was too beautiful. This is not the sort of charity that
should begin at home.
What does a man find sexually attractive in a
two or three-year old girl? For these depraved men to go that low is much more
serious than you might think. Their lust has no boundaries. Anything called a
girl-child is game; therefore, every girl-child is in danger of falling a
victim to these sexual predators.
The internet has complicated paedophilia
globally. This important social and business communications tool has been
turned into a tool in the hands of criminals of all hues – rapists,
paedophiles, 419, etc. The Daily Mail Online reported recently
that “police around the world have taken down a global child abuse ring in
which paedophiles in at least 38 countries gained ‘loyalty points’ for
uploading abuse videos.” The police found that “more than 250,000 videos stored
on a computer server in South Korea…were sold to paedophiles around the world.”
The U.S. justice department and its
counterparts in Europe are fighting this global scourge of child abuse. Nigeria
too should join in the fight. Europol reported recently that Belgian
authorities are working with it to crack down on the paedophile ring, probed
“into a paedophile ring that abused children just a few months old.” Some of
these children are boys. Four men were convicted by a Belgian court for their
crime.
My reference to these reports is to show that
given the reach of the internet and the freedom to access sites of one’s
choice, our country is not safe either from these sexual predators within and
without. I am willing to bet that there must be local sexual abuse rings
collaborating with other global sexual rings and luring our unsuspecting young
people into their trap. Give some thoughts to our girls trafficked to Italy and
other European countries. Their search for gold using their bodies often turns
awry and they are stranded.
Here is the rub. The Daily Trust story
referred to earlier, reported that “some of the conditions that increase the
risk of the girl-child to sexual abuse can be found in schools, baby factories,
child labour, poor parenting and poverty. This is in addition to a growing
number of girls in the rural areas who drop out of school to avoid being raped
on their way to or from school via lonely footpaths.” These problems always
boil down to poverty and lack or abbreviated personal opportunities.
Child abuse, sexual and non-sexual, is a
serious problem in our towns and cities. There is the problem of child labour.
Big madams turn their house helps into hawkers, under all kinds of harsh
weather conditions, in defiance of the labour laws. The law turns a blind eye.
What the law does not see, it cannot act upon. Dubious employment agents
recruit young girls from the rural areas and farm them out as house helps. It
does seem attractive to them and their parents that they will be paid wages to
support a life different from the hard scrabble they escaped from in their
villages.
But the lot of many of these children is anything but rosy. They are subjected
to all kinds of harrowing inhuman treatments by their madams, including
starving them, pouring boiling water on them, setting their hands on fire,
chaining them and flogging them, often for being suspected in minor cases of
alleged theft of food or little money. Some of those who cannot bear it, run
away only to end up as child prostitutes and sex slaves because they are too
ashamed to return home to their villages empty handed.
The situation raises a fundamental question:
Who will protect our girl-child? Not the father of the girl-child because he is
a predator, forcing himself on his under-age girl-child. Not the family
relations and friends because they too are all sexual predators. Not the
neighbour, because he is a predator, waiting in the corner to corner the
under-age child of his neighbour and subject her to a mindless sexual abuse.
We can turn to God. But I suppose it is more
practical for us to turn to federal and state governments for a meaningful
response to this consuming menace. Governments have both the legal and the
moral duty to protect the girl-child from the sort of harm that abbreviates her
right to a better future. Our governments at all levels are working hard to
build a better future for our country. But if they neglect to protect the
girl-child and give her a future, they would only be busy building that
promised rosy future on fine sand.
*Agbese is a veteran
journalist
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