Many years ago as I prepared a consultancy brief for a United Nation’s organisation on the cusp of the world conference on women in Beijing, I came across a disturbing piece of writing in an International Red Cross document. My jaw dropped and chills ran down my spine. It was a well-researched and well analysed report on the state of refugees in different refugee camps across the world. One chapter particularly caught my eye. Written in the first person by an operative of the United Nations high commission for refugees, UNHCR, I read it slowly over and over again.
The first pain was that several prisoners of war and civilians had been dehumanised and disfigured either by the army of the warring parties or were being punished by random rebels just for the pleasure of it. A man’s back had been scorched with a pressing iron leaving a huge scar, the footprints of the instrument of torture, while another was shown with the fingers of his left hand neatly chopped by a machete. The Beijing conference was in 1985, such a long time ago, but the images from that document remain with me forever.
While I pondered on what drives man to primordial insanity, I encountered other pictures which looked fairly ordinary. Women hurdled together in refugee camps with vacant eyes. I began to read the stories of women as cannon fodder in needless wars they know nothing about. Wars decided and prosecuted by people they don’t even know, have never met; wars they do not understand the beginning or the end. It is in this document that I began to read about the psychological trauma of people who have no scars to show for their being caught in a war, no cut fingers, no scorched backs. I began to see why women in most of the pictures looked vacant. I began to read that most of these women had been raped and could not find the words to process their horror or describe it. I began to read about serial rapes, gang rapes and forced incest on boys and men, some as young as 15 made to rape their mothers; stories of grandmothers raped by rampaging rebels, government troops and enemy soldiers, of grown men made to watch their wives being raped, of insanity and the worst form of depravity, of drugs, slavery and unspeakable things. This is how I understood the meaning of non-physical trauma and wondered if it was not better to have your back scorched and live to tell the tale than to be defiled and die a million times, wishing for death. Some of the women were unable to speak for years after being raped. It was as sad as it was humbling. It is what anti-war advocates see that make them so vociferous, so angry.
It is why my stomach churns with every rape story I see in Nigerian papers, of incest and mindless university undergraduates, of armed robbers shooting 16years olds who refuse to be defiled. Recent statistics show that rape is on the increase in Nigeria and we all sit down and watch as our Nation’s mothers and aspiring mothers are destroyed.
No nation survives the systematic destruction of its women. Information reaching me under the radar suggests that insurgents in the North East are capturing women and girls and converting them to sex slaves and there is also a real threat of incest as mothers and sisters are being raped by family members. It boggles the mind.
This is not the first time I am writing about rape on this page but I am getting increasingly distressed.
In case you did not know, here is what happens to rape victims. I have interviewed a few. They become promiscuous due to an eroded self-esteem. They are constantly angry at society and become rebellious. They become suicidal or they become recluses unable to deal with the real world. They have complex characters and mood swings. They are sadists and wish harm on other people including loved ones. They become sexual deviants. Should we just sit and do nothing?
Our children are no longer safe in schools as teachers take advantage and they are also not safe at home, fathers and brothers take advantage too.
Any absentee parent who is not paying attention is at risk of losing her child to a predator. Watch out for family friends who dot on a daughter, a male teacher who looks dodgy and the plumber who visits when you are not home. Keep an eye on the house boy, a charming electrician or your daughter’s classmate. It is getting increasingly difficult to profile a rapist these days. It could be anybody, as they are becoming more and more regular; your neighbour’s son, a trusted uncle, a loving teacher. Increasingly women and girls in Nigeria have no hiding place. And we are not even at war.
READ….
• Long walk from home by Ismail Baah
• Uwem Akpan’s Say you are one of them.
By: Eugenia Abu
