rape and incent

“I started sleeping with my 15-year-old
daughter sometime in January after I lost my

job.” This is part of the confession of a 41-
year-old father in Vanguard, June 28, 2016.
He claims frustration over the loss of his job
led him to alcoholism and incest. But he
was still sober enough to sleep with his
daughter only after his wife has gone to
work. He therefore knew full well that what
he was doing was wrong.
We have talked about rape and incest in this
column before, but both maladies have
become so widespread, they cannot be
ignored. At a meeting of an NGO I belong to,
two weeks ago, a woman came to, among
other things, report her “husband”, a man
she has seven children for, although they
are not married traditionally, legally or
joined in holy matrimony. According to her,
the man left her and the children sometime
ago. To lessen the burden of upkeep, she
sent her second child, a 16-year-old girl, to
live with her mother.
The husband, without informing her, went to
bring the daughter back from the village.
When she found out, she sent her son to go
and verify. She said the son knocked and
stayed outside for two hours before father
and daughter opened the door of an abode
that cannot be more than two rooms. The
son came back to tell the mother that he
was not comfortable with the compromising
position in which he saw the father and the
sister and the kind of “play” they engaged
in, in his presence. She went to bring the
daughter to her house, but the father asked
the daughter to come back and she was
back with the father as at the time she
came to us. We do not act based on one-
sided stories, but we advised her to bring
her daughter back as a first step.
Many father/daughter relationships, like the
proverbial handshake, have gone beyond the
elbow. Some are cases of rape and threat
to harm if exposed, but some others are
consensual. No day passes without a story
of rape or incest. These cases of incest
have nothing to do with Electra Complex (a
young girl’s sexual attraction towards the
father or a father figure). In the case of
consensual sex, these girls have clearly
gone beyond Electra Complex age. It is a
phenomenon that bush and naïve people like
me can only describe as sexual insanity.
A woman travels, leaving father and
daughter at home; unknown to her, she has
given two lovers a blank cheque. Who knows
what is happening between boys and their
mothers? One woman in Zimbabwe actually
married her own son and was pregnant for
the son as at the time the news broke. With
the way some youngsters have developed an
appetite for older women, like some lions
develop appetite for human flesh, do not be
surprised if it turns out tomorrow that incest
between mothers and sons is in fact
happening and rampant. After all, our people
say that it is sleep that gives you an idea of
what death looks like. It is not beyond a
youngster’s taste for older women to extend
to his mother and aunts.
So many reasons are adduced for incest.
When the fathers are caught, they blame
the Devil or frustration as in the case above.
Some people say the fathers do it for money
rituals or other devilish intentions. Now, I do
not know how this works, but I do know that
in the kingdom of the Devil, nothing is free.
So assuming the fathers get this money,
power or whatever they want for engaging in
incest, what becomes of the lives of the
daughters?
There was a famous quote during Ibrahim
Babangida’s government: “For their
tomorrow, we are sacrificing our today.” In
this case, the fathers are sacrificing their
daughters’ tomorrow for their today. Good
parents pray that their children should reach
greater heights than they have reached and
follow up the prayers with self denial and
sometimes enormous sacrifices. These
incestuous fathers certainly have other
agenda.
But the most scandalizing of all are parents,
uncles, relatives and other adults who rape
minors, sometimes as young as two years. I
asked this question a few months ago: How
do you rape a two-year-old? Is that not
insanity? Shouldn’t such rapists be confined
to special prisons cum mental asylum?
Going through our laws, we have many legal
provisions to take care of rapists,
paedophiles and other sexual offenders, but
enforcement is weak. Many families also
treat sexual crimes as family matters. We
also have security agencies that are
unwilling to prosecute cases of sexual
assaults. Then there is the society that has
not given these offences the seriousness
they deserve.
After these traumatized underaged survive
the sexual onslaught at home and get into
higher institutions, some lecturers want to
continue from where the victims’ relatives
stopped. In a society where playing the
ostrich is the norm, the Senator representing
Delta Central, Ovie Omo Agege, supported
by 45 other senators, came up with a “Bill
for an Act to Make Provision for the
Prohibition of Sexual Harassment of
Students by Educators in Tertiary
Educational Institutions and for Matters
Connected Therewith, 2016.” The bill has
gone through public hearing where ASUU
made efforts to shoot it down. Their
argument is that the universities already
have internal provisions to deal with sex-
related offences. Many higher institutions in
Nigeria are cesspits of sexual exploitation.
How many offenders have these provisions
caught up with?
My only worry is that after passage, will the
law enforcement agents and authorities in
higher institutions cooperate (the stiff
penalties for noncooperation
notwithstanding) to bring offenders to book?
By the way, the Seventh Senate passed a
bill for “An Act to Make Provision About
Sexual Offences, their Definition, Prevention
and the Protection of All Persons from
Harm, Unlawful Sexual Acts, and for
Purposes Connected Therewith.” It was one
of the 46 bills the Senate passed into law
towards the end of its tenure and fills a
lacuna in the laws of the federation.
Presidential assent is overdue.