Recent happenings across the globe, our clime not an exception, concerning rape is only a resurgence of what has been with us; just that the power of electronic media and sundry information channels have made it more obvious than previously.
The number one problem that must be addressed if we seek an enduring solution is that of poor education, right from the homestead. This is the charity that must begin at home. Without the right education to school and purify the mind, rape and other dehumanizing acts will only exacerbate.
For the immediate or short term, there has to be punishment for such misdemeanour, but not without a mind reset program through critical engagement, while punishment is being served. There is a possibility for some to find healing through the process. For others, government should not be too cautious to try ostracism of agents of bestiality.
Victims do need counselling and consistent care. The damage done to the mind is lifelong and almost irreparable, I can imagine. Getting to heal through such an experience especially for one who has experienced it serially through men or women who are family is difficult, if it ever happens, that is. It's even more difficult when we see that the majority of cases are perpetuated by close relatives.
Who raised these rapists? How were they raised? What informs and equips their mindset? What examples did they have growing up? What were they exposed to? From home to school, the issue of education is poorly handled.
When a kid grows up in a volatile environment where wife battering is the order of the day and such like behaviours, and it does not heal from such, what do you expect? The paradigm of such a child is formed already and if such a kid grows up that way and is never healed of it, the violent traits are embedded deep in their subconscious, whether they are male or female.
These find expressions in different ways: self-abuse, wife abuse, husband abuse, self-harm through various means and in different ways. What happens to children who were neglected and left to themselves and who stray unchecked into different vices? Not all neglected children go the wrong way. Some find themselves and use that negativity to find the positive.
The majority of the young ones who are sold to and given to such vices have low self-esteem, vent against the system and mostly target the poor and the lower middle class, if there's anything like that, because they hardly can reach the rich and influential. But again, such acts are not limited to any race. We can find them across the board in different percentage.
This is the reaping time of poor education foundations, of poor values, of poor indoctrination and negative environmental influences that are replete and daily occurrences in our society. Negativity has become a norm and society is in very dismal and bestial shape because you can hardly differentiate the actions of some humans from beasts. Even beasts maintain their estate. Humans are only humans by their physical makeup and configuration: empty shell. The being within is monstrous.
Rapes and related abuses do not happen altogether through strange meetings or by strangers. We do know about rapes committed by armed robbers, rapes in war situations and such like, but what about the more painful one done by friends against friends, neighbours against neighbours, colleagues against colleagues, bosses against colleagues, and those people who are so close to us that we entrusted our lives to in the belief that we were safe in their hands? What a height of treachery.
Perhaps the biggest rape that we are not even talking about is the rape of a nation by its leaders. I remember telling a friend almost a decade ago that Nigeria is yet virgin, great for investment opportunities and his reply to me was that Nigeria is raped sore and defiled by those who are supposed to keep her from defilement. The citizens are raped day by day. The narrative has not changed. Who shall rescue her?
It's quite gloomy because more than a generation is almost lost. We have work to do as a people and we don't seem ready to take the bull by the horns. The odds are stacked against us. It's a gloomy space that we occupy. Our hands are weakened by the evil that we have embraced and the values that we have divorced.
How much longer can we hold till our society disintegrates into total chaos? What can save it? The perpetrators of these evils, regardless of where or who they are shall pay, whether by the judgment of man or that of God. Something has to give.
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