Raped in Nigeria!

They stuffed rags into my mouth to stop me from screaming

By EMMANUEL ONYECHE
Published: Sunday, 25 Jan 2009

EMMANUEL ONYECHE examines the agonies of two teenagers, who were raped for over 45mins by a gang of four in the Bariga area of Lagos, and why the Office of the Public Defender thinks that it’s one rape and child abuse too many

BETWEEN 11pm and 11.45pm last Sunday, little Pelumi Osho (not real names) went through the most terrifying experience of her young life. Three members of a gang of four consisting of people she knew and probably called Broda (brother) respectfully in her native Yoruba dialect, held her hostage and took turns defiling her while the confused and terrified girl shouted for her mummy.

Dr. Rotimi Adesanya, a medical officer with the Lagos State Health Services Commission, who examined Osho at the Gbagada General Hospital last Monday, less than 24 hours after her ordeal said, “I found out that she has a lot of genital bruises – wounds on her private part – and her hymen (which makes Pelumi a virgin – if intact) was torn.”

Osho’s elder sister, Funmilayo, 18, (also not real names) went through the same experience. All four members of the gang raped her. She said of the gang: “Whenever they see me passing, they usually call me but I don‘t answer them and they used to tell me not to worry that one day their trap will catch me.”

The trap caught two – Funmilayo, who went to buy sachet powdered milk from the shop of a ‘Mallam’ five houses away from her abode at No 7 Alhaji Ariyo Street Owonshoki, Bariga, and her small sister, Pelumi, whom she took along as a sign of precaution because it was late in the night.

At the OPD, where Adesanya took the two girls to, Pelumi has withdrawn into her shell and still wears a confused look. She speaks very little and does meet the gaze of people who speak to her, as she prefers to either cover her face with her hands or look away. It is obvious that the small girl had started to bear the shame of a humiliation she hopes she would one day wake up from and discover that it was all a dream.

Funmilayo said, “As we were coming from the shop of the Mallam, they grabbed us from the back. It was me they first held and two of the boys grabbed Pelumi and carried her away through a corner in the street to an uncompleted building. As I was screaming calling for my sister, they put rags in my mouth to stop me from screaming. They took me to an open classroom that somebody uses to teach people lessons. Four of the boys raped me in turns and afterwards, three of them also went and raped my sister.

“I recognise and know three of them. One is called Alfa, another one is called Akilapa and the other one is called Abbey.”

The mummy that Pelumi was shouting for was far away in Ijebu Ode, where the children hail from. They live with their elder brother. It was to this elder brother that the children reported the ugly incident after the gang had released them.

Funmilayo said, “My brother took us to the house of the man who was harbouring the gang and they were there. The man asked us to identify the culprits and we pointed them out, but they all denied and started threatening my brother that they would stab him with bottle.”

They actually stabbed someone – Sunday – a policeman who resides in the neighbourhood.

“When the policeman intervened following the noisy argument that the boys were having with my brother, they stabbed him in the mouth,” Funmilayo said.

Sunday brought in policemen that night that were able to arrest one member of the gang and the man harbouring them. The next day, two other members of the gang were also picked up. The two girls also went to the Bariga Police Station, where the officer in charge of the case, Francis Fesobi, recorded their case and gave them papers to go to the hospital for examinations and tests.

Adesanya, who also belongs to a non-governmental organisation – The Nucleus Group – brought the children to OPD. Aware of the pranks of some policemen who frustrate the prosecution process, Mrs. Omotola Rotimi, the OPD director, visited the Bariga Police Station, where Fesobi gave assurances that the case would be duly prosecuted.

A worried Rotimi raised the alarm over the rising cases of child sexual abuse in Lagos. She said, “So many children, who are raped never get justice and we feel that it is time we start proffering charges and getting justice done. Now we are going to go all out. Once there is evidence that someone has committed sexual offence against children, we will do all in our power to get justice done. We are ready to cooperate with the police 100 per cent.”

Indeed Rotimi’s determination represents hope to the thousands of Nigeria‘s children who undergo the horrors of sexual abuse. Some of these abuses, recounted below, will shock anyone with a sense of modesty.

Last October, the media reported the case of three kids of the same parents, aged between two and six years who were defiled the same day. The alleged rapist, Emmanuel Assai, 25, a Ghanaian, allegedly tricked the children into his room and, according to preliminary medical examination carried out on the children, gained forceful entry into them. Enraged mothers in the neighbourhood who were shocked by the swollen pubic regions of the children and the blood dripping from them were said to have beaten the rapist to a state of being half dead before the police arrived.

Last August, Covenant Elijah, 11, a Junior Secondary School I student of Caritas Model College, Onireke, Ibadan, was found dead at a church which specialises in miracle deliverance where she had been taken by her mother for spiritual deliverance after also being accused of witchcraft. She was allegedly raped to death by the presiding pastor of the church who charged a fee of N2,000. The pastor recommended three days deliverance to Covenant’s mother. But after the three days, what was found was Covenant‘s naked body with congealed blood gushing out of her private parts in the pastor‘s bedroom.

Also in Ibadan, Oyo State, 10 boarding students of Saint Anne‘s College, the school Bola Ige’s wife attended, were raped by hoodlums in their dormitory sometime last year for hours unchallenged.

Last September in Benin, Edo State, a mother was said to have cut the private parts of her eight-year-old daughter and rubbed pepper into it after she discovered that her daughter was sexually abused by her stepfather. Amazingly, she transferred her anger to her traumatised daughter whom she accused of having a ‘love affair’ with her ex-husband.

Princess Olufemi Kayode, an Ashoka Fellow and Executive in Charge of Media Concern Initiative – a NGO that caters for the interest of women and children – says there is nothing new under the sun and that when it comes to child sexual abuse, she is no longer shocked.

She reveals the case of some young children who were paid certain amounts to sleep with dogs. Kayode also told the story of a mother whose four children sucked her vagina. The children were aged seven years, five years and a set of twins aged three. She also revealed the case of a six-month-old baby molested by her neighbour and the case of a six-year-old girl defiled and killed with a hoe when she threatened to report to her mother.

According to the first UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children, released in 2006, 150 million girls and 73 million boys under 18 experienced forced sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual violence during 2002. Between 100 and 140 million girls and women in the world have undergone some form of female genital mutilation/cutting. In sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and the Sudan, three million girls and women are subjected to genital mutilation/cutting every year.

Kayode describes child sexual abuse as an epidemic today and says it is because adults have refused to take adequate and proactive steps towards their God-given role of responsibility for the protection of children. She says lack of accurate information about the consequences of sexual abuse on a child‘s present and future is a contributing factor and asks, “How can you address what you cannot comprehend?”

Other reasons she gave for the rising epidemic include inadequate and improper handling of preventive and response measures for child sexual abuse as well as easy access to x-rated and adult content materials by children, through our TV stations’ musical contents, drama etc.

”Moreover, we have been carried away by the stranger syndrome – that perpetrators are strangers. Over 80 per cent of people who abuse children are people the children know and are familiar with. It is an assumption that men are the only perpetrators, but women are also perpetrators. Also, victims are both male and female. Perpetrators are also children,” she says.

Rotimi says the thing to be done is to continue to sensitise the public as well as create awareness amongst the children. ”We can, for example, sensitise a child that it is not safe for him or her to go out in the night and if the child must, it must be in the company of an adult. We can even begin also to teach the children self defence,” she said.

For now, Funmilayo and Pelumi have been taken into protective custody. Rotimi says, “We will hand them over for protection to Project Alert, an NGO that has a shelter for the protection of women and children against sexual abuse. When we have a case of emergency, before we go to court, and we think that the victims need care and protection, like in the case of these children, where some of the culprits who had the guts to stab a police man are still at large, we hand them over for protection and we make sure that their parents or guardians are fully aware of what we are up to at all times.”

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