[size=14pt]The Experiences Of Rape Victims [/size]
Written by Modupe Ogunbayo
Friday, 16 September 2011


Rape is on the increase and women who fall victim face not only the emotional trauma and stigmatisation but difficulty in getting justice
Mary Adams (not real names) just abandoned her undergraduate studies because she was unable to pay her fees and other associated costs. It was only a year to her graduation. Turning to her parents for succour was incomprehensible because she had been estranged from them. Adams, 23, has not seen her mother who separated from her father when she was nine years old and she ran away from home at 20 shortly after gaining admission to a university. Why? Her father had been raping her regularly since she was 12.


Adams’ inability to condone the psychological and physical trauma of being sexually abused by her father forced her to flee from home. She started living with friends and before long, she became a regular patron of Lagos’ top nightclubs where she prostitutes herself to raise money to resume her studies.
She gradually settled down to prostitution as her only source of livelihood “I am defiled, tainted and of no value deep inside of me regardless of what people say to the contrary. How can my own father do that?,” she said, adding, “I can’t adjust to normal life again. Since my education has stopped now, I’m looking at other options…like going to Italy soon,” she said. That is the effect of incestuous rape on Adams.
The case of Bisi Williams (not real names) is not exactly the same. It was not incestuous but caused by date rape. She paid a visit to her boyfriend shortly before their graduation from a technical college. Unknown to her, three other men were lurking around to rape her. Shortly after she entered, they emerged, locked the door and gang-raped her. Her boyfriend initially refused to join in but he was beaten into raping her too. Since that day, Williams, 35, has found it impossible to maintain a healthy relationship with men. “At crucial moments, I just turn off,” she said. Williams has made an appreciable level of success in her banking career, but despite her good exposure, she does not see the possibility of getting married, nor consulting a psychiatrist. That experience has remained a big burden for her.


Rape committed against women and girls, especially the underaged, have become rampant. In Ifo, Ogun State, an 11-year-old girl was raped by Ishola Okugbesan, a 56-year-old neighbour who she normally ran errands for. Her unsuspecting mother even encouraged her to do household chores for the man who is separated from his wife. All of a sudden, the girl, who just commenced menstruating, stopped doing so and developed worrisome symptoms similar to pregnancy. She was confirmed pregnant at the hospital. The girl later delivered the baby surprisingly without caesarian section but died shortly thereafter due to complications from labour. That is the fatal effect of rape on a minor.


The affluent in the society are not immune to rapists. In GRA, Magodo-Shangisha, Lagos, a mother was perplexed to discover that her three daughters were always quarrelling and even fighting almost daily. All her efforts to unite them and make love reign among them failed. Eventually, she persuaded the youngest to reveal the underlying reason for their behaviour because she discovered the quarrel was unabating. The mother fainted and was rushed to the intensive care unit of a hospital after she heard the news. The family driver usually parked on a deserted stretch of the road on his way to Magodo while picking the three girls from school to rape them in the car with all of them witnessing the episodes. He started with the eldest and later moved to the middle sister which explained their bitter quarrels. He just started with the youngest who revealed all to their mother. Invariably, the driver had raped all the girls.

As worrisome as these cases are, they are still considered luckier because they did not contract sexually transmitted diseases from the act. The Gombe State Command of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, recently paraded 40-year-old Gambo Abare, an HIV-positive man from Gadam village, for allegedly raping a five-year-old girl. Altine Sani, the NSCDC commandant in the state, said the alleged rapist was caught in the act at about 6 p.m. in his grain-milling machine shop as the little girl was about to take food meant for breaking fast from her father to her grandmother. Abare lured her into the shop with sweets where she was defiled. HIV-positive Abare admitted defiling Ramatu and also confessed to raping five other underage girls within the same week, one of whom was his underage niece. He said he had been in the act of raping underage girls since last year.

http://www.newswatchngr.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3494&Itemid=1