Wanda’s story
Wanda Adu is a 34-year-old single mother of a four-year-old son from Benue state, in the mid-belt region of Nigeria. Her long ordeal with sexual violence began when she was only six years old. The third of seven children (four brothers and two sisters), she grew up with her parents. At six years old, Wanda’s female nanny—a distant relative—would ask her to perform MouthAction on her whenever Wanda’s parents were out. That happened for five years while the nanny lived with the family. “I didn’t like it, but I had to do it because she would threaten me,” Wanda told me. Because her parents were very strict and devout Christians, she felt she could not open up to them about the abuses. “When I was six years old, [the nanny] poured hot boiling water on me. I still have the scars from the burns,” Wanda said, raising her dress to show me the scars on her stomach and side. “I didn’t go to school for one year—between ages six and seven—because of the burns,” she continued. The nanny would tell her that if she mentioned the abuse to anyone, “I’ll kill you.”

“I didn’t want to vanish, so I had to be quiet about it,” Wanda said. There was more to come. While she was in fourth grade at the age of nine, a male school typist molested her. “He called me into his office and asked me to raise my uniform,” Wanda said. “I asked him why and he said he wanted to check if I had pubic hair. I hesitated, but he put his hand [inside my underwear].” After Wanda confided in a female teacher whom she trusted, the man was called in for questioning by the school headmistress and fired following his confession.

As a mature 13 year-old, Wanda was also harassed by her teachers in secondary school. “They would say things to me that made me feel very insecure, and I was very shy. I felt I was abnormal because I matured very early.” During her final year in secondary school, a teacher asked her to kiss him, but she ran out of his office. Later in university, Wanda escaped two rape attempts, one at gunpoint and another by a gang of boys during her first year. She says she also failed a course because she refused to engage in sexual intercourse with her professor (whose son was her classmate). “I had an A in the course, but somehow after the exam, my name was missing from the examination attendance list,” she told me.

Hello share your stories and how you overcame....


Ladies. And gent's