That there’s an increasing number of rape cases in Nigeria, especially during this lockdown era, is not news to many of us. The question we probably have not asked is the correlation between social lock down and rape?
Why is there so much increase in rape in the past few months, and why are some of these rapes violently brutal?
First, let me say this, that, a man who cannot control his sexual urge should not have a penis in between his legs. If such has a penis, it’s quintessential to a mentally deranged person having a loaded AK47 in his hand: many will be wounded or killed by his bullets.
That said, have you observed that the violent rapes where young women have been killed are what you could safely classify as Ghetto Rape?
In my view, there are three kinds of rape; Sensual-emotive Rape, Diplomatic Rape, and Ghetto Rape.
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Sensual-emotive rape is the regular rape, it could be a little violent or non-violent at all.
Diplomatic rapes are those engineered by power or authority over the victim, and are never violent. The victims often surrender their will to save their careers or academic goals. Examples of such are, MD or Manager raping his or her subordinate or high school lecturer sexually harassing the students.
Ghetto rape is usually carried out in poor urban environments where illiteracy and poverty is high. The rapists are always men. A victim could either be raped by one individual thug or gang-raped. It is usually very violent and often results to victims’ deaths.
I’ll be focusing more on Ghetto Rape here, because of the rising cases of deaths to such rape.
You never really know an uncultured poor man’s desperate quest for sex until you bump into their midst.
I once visited a friend’s site where I met one of the workers working at the site, who received his peanut pay and went to the nearby brothel daily to drink and lay with prostitutes. His ultimate goal for working was so he could drink dry gin and have sex, nothing more.
I was also at a mechanic workshop with a friend, some many years back, and saw this man, whom I believe should be in his mid 30s at the time, working so hard and carrying huge irons and all those heavy mechanical tools.
We got talking when I heard him and his co-worker discussing their plans to have prostitutes at their usual joint. Here were poor men I pitied that they were working so hard but getting little next to nothing as take home, wondering how they survive, talking about paying sex workers! They were just messengers to the real motor repairers, and have no shop of their own. Could they afford sex workers? I kept thinking about that, and even wondering what kind of women would, in their right senses, allow these dirty poor men to sleep with them because of their little change.
“How much do you make in day?” I asked them.
“It depends. Sometimes 1k or 2k, and some days nothing at all,” they answered me.
“And that’s enough for you to waste on prostitutes?”
“Ashawo cheap oh!”
Hearing that, I started wondering how cheap commercial sex workers could be for poor men of this type to afford them. I tried advising them against it, telling them to save their monies for something useful in their lives, but it seemed their minds were made already: they could picture themselves in bed with the prostitutes.
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I never stopped thinking about how cheap prostitutes could be for ordinary folks like these to be able to afford them. For me, it seemed really impossible.
Not long after, I was in Benin for my first ever magazine publication, and I had this new friend I stayed in his apartment. On one of the days, his friend was celebrating his birthday and invited us to his party.
I got to the venue with my friend. I’d thought the place was a regular hotel until different girls: the pretty, the ugly, the looking good, the dirty; all dressed in body-revealing clothes, started approaching me. I got to know that the hotel has a brothel, and these girls had their rooms there. When you picked the one you liked and agreed on payment, she’d take you in and have sex.
Just then, I remembered the boys at the mechanic shop at Ladipo, Lagos, and decided to find out how cheap a prostitute can be. Then came another girl toward me, her full breast well packed to her neck, revealing and tempting.
“How much?” I asked her.
“Which one do you want? Short time or overnight?” She replied.
“I don’t understand,” I told her. “What is short time and what is overnight?”
“Short time is one round of sex. Once you release your spam, you leave,” she said, staring at me. She could tell I was a stranger there. “Overnight means you’ll have me till 4a.m.”
“I see. So how much is short time and what’s your price for overnight?”
“Short time is N500. Overnight is N2,000, but I can collect N1,500. I’ll give you discount.”
“Okay, can I see you later? I’m with my friends for now.”
“Sure. But you may not see me when I’m with a customer.”
“I understand,” I said and I bade her bye.
Now I could confirm with all certainty that sex was cheap enough for the likes of those boys I met at the Mechanic Workshop in Lagos, to afford.
Of course, I was never going to patronise a commercial sex worker, especially when I’d recently heard that sex was a covenant. How could I enter into a covenant with a prostitute?
After some minutes, I decided to take a walk around the hotel (internally and externally). I saw many boys, and even married men, negotiating with the girls whilst some were seated at the bar by the brothel, drinking and smoking. As my friend (a ‘bahd’ guy himself) later told me, the drinking and smoking before going to bed with the prostitutes, helped the men to perform well during sex.
As I looked at them closely, you could tell that most of them were illiterate while others were frustrated high school graduates whose level of thinking no longer differs much from that of the illiterate ones. I saw many thugs (agberos) and the lowest fits you could think of. They all had one purpose being there, which was sex.
Street guys and other poor men who cannot afford to meet the demands from dating the average girl today, find succour betwixt the thighs of commercial sex workers. They earnestly thirst for sex and would do anything to have it.
It may interest you to note, that, watching football, drinking alcohol, and having sex, are the things which give these people joy.
Sadly for them, the recent lockdown due to Covid-19, makes it really impossible for them to enjoy those three things (football, alcohol, and sex), as social centres where these things are available are totally shot down.
Football, alcohol, and sex helped these people to manage or overcome their frustrations, and the absence may have made them see more of the frustrations they fight.
They could not force the European football leagues and football viewing centres to reopen, neither do they have the money to buy alcohol. There’s only one thing they can take with force; sex, and hence rape.
The rising rate in rape cases cannot be unconnected with the social lock down. These thugs and the poor people look for where to ‘pour spam of frustration’ to feel human, and there are vulnerable girls within their environment who suffer this consequence of a failing society.
How many are we going to arrest and send to jail? How many girls would have to suffer from rape?
Most of the violent rapists out there are not in touch with reality: they don’t know the consequence of raping a woman. Those who know the consequence try to kill their victim so that no one gets to connect them with the crime. There’s a huge sexual crisis on our hands as a nation, and it boils down to a failing society we have unfortunately built.
Illiteracy is really high, and many are homeless. To deal with the problem of rape, we need to know the root and find a way to cut it off, otherwise we would keep chasing flies away from rotten meats. The flies never go away: they’re willing to die for what they see. It’s like cutting off the branches of a bad tree, and leaving the vine and the roots: more branches will grow. The more rapists we arrest, the greater the number of rapists coming out.
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We can start dealing with this problem by starting with the family. Healthy and good families make up a healthy and peaceful society.
Government must find a way to ensure that every child is educated, and there are jobs for them. A well educated person with a job will not think of violently raping anyone.
Sadly, there are already many uneducated and poor people in the society who engage in this evil of rape. Crime is crime, irrespective of the causative factor, and people must be punished for it as a deterrent to others. Innocent girls are being violently killed, and so, the beasts have to be dealt with.
However, mere arrest and jail terms are not enough. A male rapist should have his penis and scrotum harvested out of him, and the hole left from its removal sealed by a medical professional. Nothing scares a man than the thought of losing his potency. More destructive punishment needs to be given to all rapists; be it a sensual-emotive rapist, diplomatic rapist, or ghetto rapist.
Like I stated earlier in this article, a man who cannot caution the demands of his libido is less of a man. The society must be made safe for the vulnerable girl child to live in.
©Skyfoxx Krys
