It is highly insensitive to tell an abuse victim that they are the cause of their abuse. However, that has not stopped people from periodically pulling that line out of their arsenal.
Raped women have been accused of seducing men. I still wonder what raped boys did to be victims.
An alarming 33% of girls and women have been or will be victims of one form of abuse. With boys, we are unsure about the global statistics as it is a rarely reported crime. While the average statistics show that only 1 in 10 boys will report, it is common knowledge that justice might not get served.
Under all circumstances, it is insensitive to assume these victims are the cause of these precarious situations.
In recent times, there has been a surge of femicide in countries like Kenya to the point of national protests. Yet, we have people telling women to stop protesting because Androcides are more than femicides.
Why allow the Androcide rate to keep increasing? Why are we allowing the femicides to fester? Why allow sex slavery to continue? Why allow the rapes and molestations to continue?
We have become numb from seeing too much abuse, we have blocked out what is happening in society to stay sane, and we have found excuses to absolve us from the responsibilities.
In the 12-part Sex Trauma podcast series, episodes five to nine cover why healing is hard for victims and why society cannot act better on most occasions.
However, I want to help you see how you and I leave space in our everyday lives for tyrants to have unmitigated access to mess up our society.
Individualism
Family members and friends perpetrated many crimes that necessitated individualism. Victims left when they saw a glimpse of freedom as they did not stand a chance fighting their abusers.
This was great for the hurt victim to find healing, but many people did not go to heal but went to isolate. Sooner than later, in fixing one problem, we created newer ones.
Humans are supposed to live in a community because of many reasons. A few important ones are:
Objectivity: we rarely see things as they are but through our frames of reference. When we lose objectivity because we are in love or have strong emotional connections, a third party provides objectivity.
Your closest third party can be subjective like you because they are too invested — this is where you need a communal input that focuses on what benefits you.
In an individualistic setting, you will need a professional to perform this role and an inability to pay means you have to suffer consequences before learning.
Affection: unlike sexual pleasure that can be found when you find someone who consents, affection does not happen as an activity — it is built.
To build affection, you need time, thoughtfulness and sharing (space, truth, dreams…etc). Affection is gentle and pretty slow.
The Oxford Languages dictionary defines it as a gentle feeling of fondness or liking. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary uses the word tenderness.
Affection can neither be rushed nor commanded — it comes only when you have enjoyed the presence of others.
Our communities ought to give us fond memories that keep us grounded and make us want to return home.
Protection: we are all innately wired to stay alive and protect ourselves — some people can do that better than others. Yet, we were not designed to protect ourselves alone.
If humans still lived in the wild hunting animals, they would need each other. Now, we do not live in the wild, but you will agree life is still wild — there are wars, natural disasters, increased crime rates, Gender-Based outbreaks of violence…the list goes on.
You might be able to protect yourself physically, but sometimes, you need someone to hold centre with you while you ground yourself emotionally. You need to know that you are not in this alone even if the world was crumbling.
The dangers of individualism
Vulnerability: the divide and Conquer strategy works when fighting forces that are formidable when together. A healthy family or community is most formidable when members are physically and emotionally together.
With individualism, members are usually significantly weaker as they are isolated. This means you could be in an abusive relationship, and a single soul will not know you need help.
You could live in a neighbourhood riddled with crime and have no one to stay with outside your neighbourhood.
You could be dealing with low self-esteem, and the only available person will be some narcissist (that your community cannot vet) who is using you to boost their esteem.
Increased addiction: from the rat park experiment, we understand that addictions can be prevalent when a community (wholesome pleasure) is lacking.
Addictions begin when we substitute needs we cannot meet. Masturbation can comfortably replace pillow talk — you will have a similar hormonal high and feeling of satisfaction. However, masturbation is addictive — you have to do it multiple times to get more pleasure.
Partying will exhaust you like going to the gym. At the gym, you have more quiet time to process your thoughts to a degree while you get the luxury of alcohol and loud music to block out your thoughts at a party.
If your addictions were increasing around a community that loves you, someone would have noticed enough to create an intervention. I tell my clients that a community that fights with them for their (my clients) benefit is the community to stay in.
Generational healing: to heal generationally, we need to see what previous generations have done and do better.
With everyone isolated in their corner of the world, the stories that circulate are the trauma stories. We never know who has gotten better and who has gotten worse.
The more we hear these negative stories (we will always talk about our communities), the more we feel stuck in those trauma circles and convince ourselves that the entire world is like that.
Aunt Rose’s husband used to beat her and Uncle Mot married a crazy wife who ended up in the asylum. Well, Charles is lucky that his wife only cheats.
We become so used to trauma that we start comparing whose trauma is worse. That is why we do not confront abuse — we have seen and heard so much abuse that wholesomeness is now strange news.
Privacy versus Secrecy
It is not unusual to hear of people going missing only to find out their significant other killed them, but no one found out.
As an undergraduate, it was usual to hear of ladies living with their partners during semester breaks. This one time, I resumed to hostel gossip about a lady who had accidentally died at her boyfriend’s house — leaking gas, they said.
Unfortunately, the young man did not get back until she died and merely buried her since her parents were not aware.
Over the years, we have heard more stories with similar patterns — students who went out without telling anyone, children who visited an uncle or aunt without informing their parents and many more.
As adults, we find it insulting to give information about where we are going and whom we are meeting. When in reality, we are not security conscious.
How do you explain it was a date rape when no one has ever seen you with this person? How would you find evidence and an alibi when your first date is in a part of town you have never been to?
I am saying your secrecy has left a slot for a tyrant.
Do you want privacy? Go to the VIP section of a popular restaurant where cameras can record you going in and out.
If no one knows, it is not private; it is secret. If your boss, partner or whoever cannot stand three people knowing them in a world of 7 billion people, that should be enough red flag for you.
Irresponsibility
The Cambridge Dictionary defines irresponsibility as the quality of not thinking or worrying enough about the possible results of what you do.
As a society, we have all been grossly irresponsible over the last few decades. The more individualistic we became, the more we assumed we owed society nothing. Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth.
If you boldly owe society nothing, you lose the right to complain about what society owes you.
Blame this part on being a Nigerian, but I grew up in an environment where a man who is caught beating a woman will be the one who needs the police to rescue him from the other men in the neighbourhood.
Yes, rapes happened, but it continued mainly because people were afraid of shame. Our streets were safe, and your children could hardly go missing. There were certain cities where you did not need to know anyone or have money to find a place to sleep, and those happened because we understood community.
In protecting our space, we have also made room for intruders in our lives. In creating our space, we have cracked our communal walls and left spaces for intruders to invade our communities. To make matters worse, we will not take responsibility for our part in this anarchy.
Parental Irresponsibility
Parents are taking on multiple jobs every day. This gives more time for their kids to be exposed to vices they would otherwise not attempt until they are wiser.
In practicality, these vices look like sexual exploration which could be merely watching porn content and masturbating or could escalate to sexual adventures with older people who are predatory.
Either way, we have teenagers and children exposed to more sexual experiences than they are psychologically ready for.
These exclude exposure to emotionally toxic relationships that meet the child’s needs, as explained in Toxic People Can Love Hard.
I understand the financial reasons parents will take on multiple jobs. That is why I am appealing to them not to assume that responsibility vanishes in their absence.
Every responsibility you abandon is a slot a tyrant will fill if given the opportunity.
If you are busy, find a replacement.
How parents can protect their kids
Have a solid community: Preferably, one with children your child’s age so their need for social interaction is met, and they learn how to negotiate with their age mates.
Talk to your children: no plan is foolproof. So, multiple ways of protecting your kids are required. If your kids are very comfortable with you, they will tell you about the good and horrible things. If they stop, you have an indicator that something is tampering with them.
Listen to your children: it is one thing to ask them questions and another thing to listen to their two-hour story response per question. If you are very busy, teach your kids to write you letters and drop you voice messages you can listen to later.
If you detect a change in anything, well… you have evidence. If it is goodness forever, you get beautiful memories.
External parenting: on average, kids need more than two adults to exhaust all that energy they have. So, ensure your kids have a second pair of parents they can go to, like their grandparents or mentors. Handpick their mentors or vet the ones they are drawn to — give them a reliable person to talk to aside from you.
Tell them the truth: many parents are so paranoid from their trauma that they don’t realize they are fighting their abusers through their children’s lives. Do you want generational healing? Then, tell your children about your hurts at appropriate ages so they can understand instead of making them think you are crazy and rigid.
Leadership Irresponsibility
It is common to hear stories of leaders (religious, political, familial, and professional) abusing their subordinates. It becomes even scarier when you consider these people are usually the judges of matters like this.
We have handed over the city to the thief to protect it. Yet, we wonder why things are getting destroyed.
The Late Gen. Sani Abacha said, “For any Insurgency that lasts more than 24 hours, a government official has a hand in it.”
Let us apply this to our judiciary, religious, cultural, professional and family systems, and you will realize that the reason abuse prevails is that a significant number of our leaders are abusers in their own way.
The flip side is that those who are not have chosen the path of silence (drink water and mind my business) as long as it does not get to them.
The slot of tyranny is that our leadership systems have more ways to escape than they have ways to be accountable.
Younger me always heard the question, can you sue the government and win? It was a rhetorical question to which the answer was a loud resounding NO. We have developed apathy even in places where we can hold our different governments accountable.
Our apathy is the forerunner of our doom because abuse will keep being prevalent, getting excused and renamed.
The age of sexual consent keeps fluctuating, yet we keep making excuses.
We cannot be more loyal to any sitting government (political, religious, familial, cultural and professional) than we are to the next generation.
Collective Irresponsibility
Parents are busy making money, teachers are trying to make it through the rowdy kids in their classes, uncles and aunties live out of town, neighbours live within their fenced compounds, the government official is embezzling some funds, and the children have nowhere to go to than their devices or the streets.
It is no wonder cyber-grooming is increasing at a rapid rate, kids are developing body dysmorphia more than ever before, and trauma is multiplying right before our eyes.
I went from hearing about 419 (cybercrime) once every few months as a teenager to hearing it weekly on the radio in less than sixteen years.
You and I left space for that girl to be raped when we did not think it wise to find out who her mum was and why she was always roaming around after school.
I used to have a neighbour who had a gifted son — he was so smart that school was boring for him, and it did not help that he was also a physically athletic kid. I used to joke that I would have adopted him if I was older.
The last I saw him, he was playing with nylon bags behind his phone and lying to the person on the call that he was riding a motorbike heading towards the person.
I do not know where he is now, but I hope a reasonable person (a father figure) decides to mentor him without leaving to his antics.
When you and I think mentoring is too much responsibility, when we think volunteering at the community centre is too much work, when we complain about the kids in the neighbourhood disturbing us, let us be aware that there are only four options:
- A more reasonable person takes our place
- They go to their mobile devices
- They figure things out themselves and get as many scars as possible
- They get groomed by an abuser who has their time
Like I always say, abuse is a norm when unquestionable power meets ignorance. Our job is to educate and empower the ignorant so they can identify abuse, point it out and collectively fight toxicity when they individually don’t have enough power to fight.
If you do not educate yourself and those around you, you will be victims of abuse who mostly never get the opportunity to fight back.
Did you enjoy reading this? Leave me a comment, highlight your favourite paragraph, share this on Twitter and Instagram and tag me @iamlizachuma
Balance your reading
Kindly read, interpret and apply to your children — I write for adults and have examples that are directly related to sexual relationships.
- Generational Healing: lock trauma out before it spills into the next generation.
- Toxic People Can Love Hard: foolproof your children by supplying their needs before an abuser does.
- Be Picky: teach your children how to spot abuse from a mile away.
- It’s not just friendship: teach your children how to choose honouring relationships.
- Love is a fight: fight for your children if you are already losing them.
If you have any questions, ask me anonymously.
