•Rapists, who posted their victims’ nude pictures on the internet, must not go unpunished
ONDO State Police Command must live to its promise of ensuring that the five men that allegedly raped two girls, videotaped the proceedings and posted it on the internet, are prosecuted and made to pay for their crime, if convicted. The men, Bode Akinsiku, Olabanji Femi, Abiodun Ayodele, Fadairo Wahab and Adedayo Adebayo, allegedly raped the girls at the Odosida area of Ondo town, Ondo State. According to the victims, the men had lured four of them into the house of one of the suspects, on the pretext that he was marking his daughter’s birthday.
“They stripped us naked and seized all our clothes; they recorded the video after all of them had had sexual intercourse with us one after another. They equally threatened to take us to the street naked. We cried and begged them to allow us to go after they had raped us”, one of the girls said.
She added: “They lured us to the area around 11.30am; they held us hostage for several hours. They later fetched water for us and allowed us to take our bath; they bought rice for us to eat and freed us in the evening. We reported the matter to one of my brothers, who vowed to get the video and report the matter to the police.”
Two of the girls were, however, fortunate to have escaped the ordeal.
Rape is bad enough; to now rape and post the crime on Facebook, or any social media channel for public consumption, is the height of bestiality. All right-thinking persons should condemn such depravity in the strongest terms. What did the suspects hope to achieve by making the scene available to the public — to humiliate their victims, or what?
That rape is becoming rampant in our society calls for serious concern. Some people have argued that rape cases are not necessarily on the increase but what has changed is the fact that, nowadays, more rape victims are opening up unlike in the past when they merely bemoaned their experience privately for fear of stigmatisation.
Apparently, the rising incidence of rape is a consequence of the demystification of sex in our society, which is also the fallout of western culture of permissiveness that has crept into the country. People, including youths and even the underaged are exposed to explicit sexual contents online, on television and even by the roadside, where newspaper vendors display pornographic materials for sale. Some of our musicians are not helping matters with the lyrics of their music, some of which are obscene.
Our governments must do something before we get used to rape as we have done with many other social maladies, which we just report and move on with our lives as if nothing unusual has happened. We have a word of caution for parents too: they must train their children properly, especially about how far they can go with strangers or people they barely know. How could girls just decide on their own to attend a birthday party that they had no prior knowledge of, or that they did not inform their parents about?
All said, the police should not bow to pressures from the so-called powerful forces in the town who want them to bury the matter. As a matter of fact, the police command should know what to do to expose such shameless individuals for who they are or what they represent. As a matter of fact, the police should be interested in probing whether the alleged rape was committed for some other sinister motives. Would the people asking for amicable settlement have been willing to cover up the case if their daughters were the victims?
We commend the right-thinking members of the society in the town who saw the incident as taboo and want that to be the last of such experience in the town. They should team up with the police by ensuring that necessary things are done to get justice for the victims.
