The other day, I watched an interview granted a four-year-old rape
survivor. Narrating how ‘Uncle Elias’, her school proprietor continuously
defiled her, the girl said: “He wide (sic) my leg, cover my mouth, tell me to
shut up….he will lap me, sit down on the chair and be doing me.” As a result,
her mother confirms she suffers grave injuries around her private part. These
past few years, I have experienced serious disturbance over alarming reports of
cases of rape and child defilements. But our laid-back approach in handling the
cases dazes me more. I don’t regard cases of child defilement as rape. I
believe it is worse. An adult can expressly deny consent. An adult can put up a
fight, and might succeed in escaping. But a child is helpless. A child does not
understand consent, cannot give, or deny it.
As a people, how have
we been able to condone this evildoing? Could it be that we are more tolerant
of child-rapists? We adopt religion and culture as modes of validating the
defilement of the girl-child. We ignore their silent screams. Why do we protect
these monsters in our space? Why is it impossible to end such occurrence? Why
can we not make those guilty of these crimes ‘pay severely’?
Marta Pais, a United
Nations envoy in an interview granted in The Guardian on March 20, 2016, puts
the statistics of Nigerian children who experience different forms of sexual
abuse at 25%. That figure should be higher, given the numbers of cases that go
unreported. In 2015, the Executive Director of Project Alert, a
Non-Governmental Organisation based in Lagos
Late
December 2015, the internet awash with a video posted by the Dorothy
Njemarze Foundation of a three-year-old recounting how her 30-year old uncle
defiled her. In 2015,
a UNICEF report states that the number of Child Brides
in Africa will rise to 310 million in the next
35 years. Many of those girls, the report concludes, are in Nigeria
Under Section 2-4 of
the Sexual Offence Bill, the penalty for defiling a child between the ages of
0-month and 18 years is life imprisonment. Under section 31(1) and (2) of
the Child’s Right Act, the punishment for defiling and raping a child is life
imprisonment. These laws are even yet to be fully domesticated in all the 36
states of the country. There are several other international treaties to which Nigeria
