I was the victim yet, they blamed me.
Everytime a rape hashtag is trending on social media, majorly twitter, my heart skip again. I've been introduced to the twitter world for over two years now and it's almost a tradition. There will always be a time that someone will fall victim of this criminal act, people will trend the cliched hashtag, "JusticeFor(fill in the victim name gap)" and then few hours later, we all return to our daily lives, like nothing wrong happened. No court proceeding to punish the offenders, no one coming out with information to convict the criminals and that's it. It basically ends there.
This is however not even the most painful of the situation. I see clueless, heartless or unbelievable people going on and on about how and why it is the victim's fault which in 99.9% of the time is a female. For these kinds of people, I have seriously ran out of adjectives to qualify them.
In a patriarchal society like Nigeria, it is even worse. They'll go "it's her fault, she's wearing seductive clothes, doesn't she know that she's basically asking for it?". They always find ways to make it her fault.
A society that places more importance on excusing the male gender for every atrocities they commit overtime, this is just a tad too far.
Sometimes, I ask myself, "what about those 5 year olds and the Muslim Hijabi who was covered from top to bottom as a result of their religious beliefs and practices, were they also asking for it? I think this all boils down to the fact to how we've failed as a society to uphold the truth which is such an ironical situation as we pride ourselves in our decency that is alledgely embedded in our cultural practices.
As a person who have first hand felt how we all accuse the victim, I can boldly say we have a long way to go. It happened one fateful night in school when I was physically attacked with a machete and robbed. The criminal who was a man was very tall and had his face covered. Without exaggerating, he was almost in the 6ft range while I was a petite 5 ft tall girl. I was coming from church which is a usual habit as a Christian and he attacked me, took my phone and threatened several other things. I had to run for my life. However, to every person I narrated the ordeal to especially the emotional trauma that followed in the subsequent weeks, they always end up saying it's my fault. Apparently, by my going to church in the evening, I was asking to be robbed or raped because "good girls don't walk at night". It negatively affected me for a long time. I began to question myself. "Was I at fault? As I'm sure several girls in my shoes have had to do same.
The stigma against rape victims who are brave enough to come out and speak against their attackers are even more heart breaking and by asking them to keep quiet, they are empowering the attackers.
I know that 80% of Nigerian homes who have a son who had committed the crime of rape would rather keep quiet about it to save face and protect their son instead of making him face the laws for his crime. They'll also go as far as shutting up their daughters who were victims saying "if you talk about it, no one will marry you as no one wants to marry someone who's been raped" thereby Silencing the fire to seek justice. And now, marriage is now a larger trophy than sanity.
Unfortunately, this showed the level of Inequality available in my society.
From the day we can utter our first word, girls are trained to keep quiet, cover up, don't get raped but nobody is telling the boys "a woman's body is not your entitlement and a 'NO' does not mean 'convince me"
to the extent that a highly reputable politician son will threatened to gang rape somebody's mother on Twitter and nobody did anything about it. His mother, a first lady went ahead to say that "all is fair in love and war" when asked about her son's statement. The journalist who dared to write and condemn the act was fired outrightly and that was it.
Obviously, if we keep this up, I fear for the next generation.
In a way to influence policies on rape, I began to read about how to fight in at least in my immediate society only to realize that some of our basic laws do not see rape a crime enough to ascribe proper punishments. For example, my school, Adekunle Ajasin University, in her 20years+ existence categorizes rape as minor offence and have no punishment provided for the offenders in the school code of conduct. Fortunately, one of my advocacies adequately corrected that, a win!
I also started this petition to take it further to the National Assembly, the highest law making body in Nigeria to follow suit.
One thing we however need is a change in reorientation. We need to raise boys who understands No and girls who are not afraid to speak out and fight the system. If not, by the end of the decade, we'll still be having this same conversation.
Help fight against rape culture, join the movement by signing this petition.
For female power.
Together, we can
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