TheCable

BY KINGSLEY OBOM-EGBULEM

“Why don’t you behave yourself, shut your mouth and cooperate, else I’ll do it by force and even if you report no one would believe you “. Not a few women in Nigeria have heard those lines spoken to them. Those words may have come from a man they once loved, a close friend or a familiar stranger about to prove his masculinity.

And we can all imagine what the end usually looks like someone is violated, assaulted and left with a painful scar sometimes deep enough to last a lifetime. We never get to see these scars.

But they are there. Deep inside.

Borne by some of the women you know, your colleagues at work and even your wife. If you are able to open and feel these wounds, your life may never remain the same again.

That’s our reality, our life, our society. The way we have come to accept that women ought to be treated.

How do you deal with a girl for saying ‘No’ to your advances and making you feel small and unwanted? How do you teach a woman a lesson she’ll never forget for the rest of her life for making you look like a sissy? When men fall into the hands of robbers and without a dime in their pocket, the robbers let them go, sometimes after a couple of slaps and kicks. But if the same robbers invade a house inhabited by women and there is no money or goods to go away with, what would likely happen to those women? What do law enforcement officers do when they apprehend helpless female suspects(usually at night) who can’t afford to bribe their way out of arrest and detention let alone have the voice influential enough to cry for help?

Of course, we all know the answer to these questions. It’s not a puzzle.

But what remains a mystery puzzle perhaps to so many of us is how got here. How did we get the point where dealing with a woman equals raping her? How did we get to the point where if a man doesn’t have anything to offer a gang of marauders, he’s left one. But a woman is presumed to always have “something” to offer and that something is in between her legs. And if she’s not willing to offer it, then it has to be taken by force? So, how do you “deal” with a man if “dealing” with a woman equals violating her?

The recent attempted rape, sexual violence and harassment perpetrated by some male students of Ireti Grammar School, Falomo against some female students of Falomo High School, has pointed us to the tip of an iceberg of sexual violence that we may have to spend the rest of life dealing with as a society. Indeed, we have birthed a culture that plays the ostrich in the face of sexual violence and molestation. In the process, we have reared a monster that is haunting and hounding us in broad daylight and expectedly we are asking “how did we get here?”.

We’ve been on this journey for a while. It looks like we are either getting to an ugly turn or approaching a dangerously overwhelming destination.

God forbid!

But I wish we won’t just leave it to God. We all as we people must forbid this culture and do something to show that we truly forbid it.

The comments by the police in Lagos on the incident that “this is not rape” but a “normal occurrence” that has been happening amongst secondary school students each time they finish their final year exams is even more revealing about what our law enforcement community thinks about sexual offences. It tells us why you may see so many people in jail for murder and robbery but no one in jail for sexual offences even though rape in itself is robbery and murder combined. A woman is robbed and most times, something dies in her when violated.

Rape is so bad that even a female sex worker ( who earns a living by having sex with men) can attest to the pain of sexual violence and the feeling of being “robbed” and killed.

Sometime in May 2016, I found myself in the midst of several angry women I later found out were sex workers. The event was a press conference called by some human rights activists on behalf of these women to protest their constant abuse and rape by men of the Nigerian police in Lagos.

I couldn’t hold back tears.

“Every day they would come to our rooms, arrest all of us if you have money 20, 000,10,000 or 5,000 they will collect it from you”, they lamented one after the other.

We were told the policemen sometimes arrest their customers while in the act. And they simply collect money from them or let them go. But not the women.

“If you don’t have money to give to them, they will rape you and if you fight or struggle with them, they will drag you into their van and take you to their station and you will be in their cell, and they will continue to rape you one by one until you are able to give them money and bail yourself. ”

So, if you’re wondering why the police behave badly most times when cases of rape and sexual violence against women are reported, you need not bother anymore. The police is a product of our growing rape culture and many of their men are either perpetrators of rape or potential rapists who would rape a woman when the opportunity presents itself.

But this is not so much about the police.

It is about our patriarchal society and how we’ve become a people that devours our women and make them feel unsafe while blaming them for not being smart enough to safeguard themselves. It is about how we’ve created a society that makes it easier to blame girls and women for being raped instead of talking to our boys about respect for women while bringing offenders to book and ensuring they end up in jail. It is about a society that makes boys feel more important than girls and makes wayward boys feel like real men and well-behaved boys feel like weaklings. It’s about a society that makes girls believe that men who are brutal and violent are just being men and anything else is an anomaly. It’s about a society that taught its boys that when a woman says No she actually means Yes and part of being a man means not taking ‘No’ for an answer especially from a woman whom you’ve desired. It’s about a society that has bred a monster and now wondering why the monster is devouring its people.

What would you expect?

The matter is simple to understand if we decide to interrogate how we got here. Every male child born into a patriarchal society is potentially abusive. His socialisation either reinforces or interrogates this potential. In other words, if you don’t deliberately raise a boy to respect women and treat them with dignity, he would abuse any women until perhaps he meets the one that has been socialised not to accept any disrespectful treatment from ANYONE including men. That suggests to us that women in patriarchal societies are also socialised to accept or stand up against abusive tendencies and treatment in whatever relationships they are in. So, the abusive man and the woman they abuse are both products of a system that have socialised them to see abuse as normal. And these men and women are today functioning in our justice, law enforcement, educational and even religious system.

That is why sometimes you wonder why it’s so difficult to expose a lecturer, police officer, pastor or even a judge who abuses women. You wonder why you have to fight and shout to protest against girls not being able to inherit their father’s property, female genital mutilation (FGM) and other practices that debases and dehumanises women and no one seems disturbed and worried if we should even have these practices in the first place let alone waiting for campaigners to shout before we do something about it.

The way out?

Let’s continue to speak up and call for the need to re-socialise our boys and our girls today about respect for self and the rights of other people because they are going to be the men and women driving our systems tomorrow. Abuse of women usually starts from home. Ending it would also start from homes.

Aside the role of patriarchy, we can’t rule out the fact that pornography, poor parenting, peer pressure and poor perception/wrong expression of masculinity got us where we are today and all of these are raging fires that can be dealt with if we are able to go back to where the fire started in the first place – the home.