–
“Man jailed 12 years for raping minors aged seven years and five years” “6 year-old raped to death in Kaduna, dumped in cemetery”“Farmer rapes minor to death in Ondo, lured her with N100”“Police arrest Nigerian Professor for allegedly raping minor in Ebonyi”“11,200 Nigerian women, children raped in 2020 – UN”.
Above are samples of newspaper headlines that point to a new fad among men and increasing menace for the Nigerian society. The United Nations say some 11, 200 Nigerian women, children were raped last year. Certainly the figure is much more than that because we live in a traditional society where women are to be seen, not heard. Many rape cases are never reported to appropriate authorities; instead they are treated as ‘family matters’ except in extreme cases where they cannot be brushed under the carpet. Such extreme cases include rape of minors as young as seven years and below as well as consequent death of such children. Increasingly we are seeing more and more children being sexually assaulted by apparently disoriented men. What the attraction is one cannot really decipher. Increasingly too, many kids are dying through rape because their feeble bodies can hardly withstand such assaults generally, especially when the abuse is continuous. Another observation is that it is not a one- off incident, that is, the rapists often indulge in their despicable behavior with same victims serially, further confirming that they are perverts. A third observation from perusing these statistics is that our justice system is still rather slow.
The man jailed 12 years for raping two children in the first quoted instance, was brought to book years after his arraignment. And the case of Elizabeth Ochanya Ogbaje is still in court. Recall that #Justice for Ochanya trended for weeks in 2018. She is the 13 year-old girl who eventually gave up the ghost due to a medical condition called Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF) and other related complications that were the result of years of serial sexual abuse of her allegedly by father and son from age nine! You can well imagine the emotional and physical pains that children that are raped to death had to go through. In addition other children that ‘survive’ such sexual battering are denied the joys of childhood. Then arises the question, who are these sexual perverts that are now prowling about our country, north, west, south and east? For, raping of minors has become so commonplace in our society that hardly a week passes without it being reported in the media. This appears to be the new pastime(sexually abusing under aged persons) of these deviants in our society. They certainly are people who are dead within, deaf to their conscience and without any grain of love whatsoever. A minor with his/her child-like innocence should elicit in any true human being the urge to protect him/her, not to harm him/her in any way, not least in a violent and unrelenting manner as crude rape, serially. They are people from the nether region, the underworld whose s propensity for evil defines their personality.
Should you ask these deviants why they did such a thing, they invariably blame the “devil” for their despicable acts. The so-called devil has become a convenient alibi for them but it is no excuse. If you ask me, they were very much aware of what they were doing. Let us even assume that the so-called devil put the evil idea into their heads, what did they do to resist it? Did they pray to the good Lord for the strength to overcome? They willingly succumbed to their weaknesses without a second thought.
Also, these obviously ‘insane’ men give the impression that they were tempted by the sight of the minors. Pray, how can a girl-child who has not fully developed the characteristics of a woman become attractive to these men as to have sex with them? The sexual instinct has not yet set in in these children, so they remain innocent children as regards that matter, oblivious of sex matters. You can argue that in these days of information explosion – online and on air – children now become aware of these issues at a much earlier age. Yet, the point remains that these children did not lure or tempt these men in any way. They were not near nude by wearing provocative dresses that set these ‘mad’ men’s imagination running wild. Even if they were, what is there to attract them in a girl child whose outward physical appearance is as yet almost the same as that of a boy?
On the contrary, they are the ones who usually lure these children that are not yet aware of the wiles of the world in terms of beguilement and cunning. Children deal with the world and human beings in a straight-forward manner. Thus, in their child-like world view, the thought hardly occurs to them that uncle, brother, daddy or grandpa can do any bad thing to them. They take advantage of their child-like innocence in which is embedded trust and obedience to deceive them into entering the privacy of their closets to have carnal knowledge of them. After their dirty act, they usually warn the girls not to reveal what happened to anyone, threatening them that they would die if they did. And the children believe these men because in their child-like world, adults do not tell lies. But the deed cannot be hidden for long. It somehow comes to the fore.
If these deviant men are really hard pressed to satisfy their sexual urge, could they not go after a consenting female adult? At worst, they could contract one at any of the red light districts. In this digital age their services are a phone call away. This is not to say that I approve of prostitution. Why they prefer to harm and spoil these un spoilt children rather than seek out fellow adult females for their sexual gratification is baffling. The only explanation is that they are arrant deviants, sexual perverts.Ikeano, a journalist, writes via [email protected] 08033077519
