Rotimi Fasan: A nation where victims are pronounced guilty of sexual violence

by Rotimi Fasan

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But the matter goes beyond the police and speaks to the Nigerian society as a whole, a society where victims of diverse perversions, especially victims of sexual violence such as rape and indecent assault of the type we are talking about, are portrayed as accused persons if not criminals. They are made to feel shame, guilt and are blamed for what they are not responsible.

Even though it was tucked away in the middle of other highlights in the online edition of the Vanguard of August 19, the headline seemed sensational enough to draw attention.

It was the story of a female police officer reportedly stripped naked at the bridgehead in Onitsha, AnambraState, by a so-called business man or ‘big man’ whose sexual advances she had rebuffed.

To teach her a lesson in ‘humility’, the report goes, the big man got her stripped. Although the police through its spokesperson in AnambraState has denied the story but I’m inclined to disbelieve the police version of events. And I’m not being merely perverse here. It’s just that the police today as an organisation has very little to recommend it as a large section of its personnel is made up of people whose moral credentials if not their mental stability give serious cause for concern.

Many of its officers are not gentlemen and its women are not ladies either and we have daily evidence of this in the number of men and women in the police who routinely demand and take bribes on the road. The police cannot be trusted as an organisation.

It lies just as it did recently in its refuted claim that it was responsible for the rescue of the abducted Archbishop of the Niger-Delta Province, the Most Rev. Ignatius Kattey. At the peril of being unfair to the very responsible and conscientious members of the Police Force, the vast majority of police men and women you encounter on a daily basis are downright unhelpful and wicked. And as a Yoruba saying has it, whoever is in possession of two evils/wickedness ends up inflicting one on themselves.

So it is with the reaction of the police to the assault of this female officer in Onitsha. Even though the police made effort to arrest her attacker, the report says, the brute was such a big man that his identity had to be concealed and the police denied the entire episode.

Not even Vanguard could provide the ‘big man’s identity. But the police or the assaulted female officers’ colleagues nonetheless had the nerve to blame and criticize her for speaking openly about the attack on her. According to them, the officer in question has, by her admission to being attacked, brought the police into disrepute. One wonders what reputation the police pretends to possess that is not daily torn into shreds by the misconduct of its discourteous, bribe-taking officers.

The police must have a peculiar sense and culture of shame that it would blame one of its own that has been assaulted by a common criminal with enough financial muscle and maybe violence to buy him protection from the law.

Why should this woman be expected to remain silent in the face of this type of attack? She is the victim and even though a police woman she has every right of protection by the law. One would have thought that the police would be very eager to take up her case as she is also an officer of the law. But no, the police has to lay claim to a reputation it doesn’t have in the first place by holding the woman to a worthless code of silence.

It’s conducts such as this that have made the police the friend of very few Nigerians despite its age-long claim that ‘the police is your friend’. An organisation notorious for its lack of empathy for citizens now cannot show it to its own members.

But the matter goes beyond the police and speaks to the Nigerian society as a whole, a society where victims of diverse perversions, especially victims of sexual violence such as rape and indecent assault of the type we are talking about, are portrayed as accused persons if not criminals. They are made to feel shame, guilt and are blamed for what they are not responsible.

Attitude like this can only strengthen the perverts who make it their business to perpetrate and perpetuate sexual violence. The proposition that there is a link between sexual violence and the culture of silence and shame that is thrown around it to the disadvantage of the victims is far from being far-fetched. Many organisations, governmental and non-governmental, have provided convincing correlation between these two variables. Personal experience also proves it.

Anyone who has encountered any victim of sexual violence like rape would have a vicarious understanding of what it means to experience such horror. An undergraduate student once recounted her experience in the hands of a rapist while doing a diploma course at Olabisi Onabanjo University. To be sure rape is rife in our universities, many of them unreported.

At the time she told her story I was, by her account, the first person she would tell aside her house mate who was also raped on the same night by the same attacker(s) in their all-female hostel. Although, it had been several years since that attack but it was obvious she felt anew what she must have felt the night of the attack as she told it again.

Her eyes were red and clouded over with tears and she continually wringed her hands and shivered all over uncontrollably as if from a terrible cold. The case of Ugochukwu Agudosi, the undergraduate student of Caleb University, recently prosecuted for serial rape proves that silence only encourages attack. Agudosi’s growing career as a rapist was brought to an end when one of his victims, his senior in the university, reported the attack rather than keep silent. Before that Agudosi is reported to have raped at least one other student lured into his trap via social media.

Hardly a day passes these days without some reported case of rape in the media. Many times such cases involve children, male and female, victims of close family members- parents, cousins or neighbours. We may not have got to the stage in India where rape crimes are fast assuming the level of an epidemic.

But we need not wait until we get to that stage. One way to achieve this is to remove the silence thrown around sexual violence, demand heavy sanction for sexual offences like rape and reject the foolish culture of blaming victims of sexual violence.

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Read this story in the Vanguard Newspapers

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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