Opinion: The Calamity of Rape, By Hannatu Musawa
It has been a trying and loaded couple of weeks in Nigeria. In deciding which topic to write on this week, it was a close contest between the dangerous and imbalanced profiling of the Fulanis, as a tribe, and the avoidable and escalating conflict between the Federal government and the Shiites. In deciding which topic to focus on, another matter that has ignited a huge national discourse kept tugging at my heart.
There has however, been various subtle media and dailies reports on rape cases with headlines such as, “4 men gang-rape 15-year-old to a coma, 14-year-old boy rapes girl to death, 20-year-old boy brutally rapes a nine-year-old girl, a 27-year-old man rapes mother, 15-year-old boy rapes three kids; including 10-month-old baby.
The main reason rape cases are hardly reported to the appropriate authorities in Nigeria is because the victims fear being ostracised and most victims of rape have lost faith in the judiciary’s securing justice for them. Rapists walk the streets free while their victims remain traumatized for life. There is no doubt that the institutions that are meant to protect women from rape have failed in their duty. Particularly, a major way the Nigerian government is failing curbing this terrible abnormality is in the several federal, state, Sharia, and customary law definitions given to rape, which makes it rather ambiguous.
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