While more attention has been paid to the girl-child and the attendant sexual abuse over-time, Dorcas Egede in this piece, reports on the under-reported yet steadily growing cases of sexual abuse of the boy-child. She spoke with several adults who recounted their sexual abuse as boys.
IT was the coordinator, Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team (DSVRT), Lola Vivour-Adeniyi, who recently sounded the warning that even as the world continues the “advocacy around the girl-child, we must not forget the boy-child, because statistics have shown that these same boys grow up to be abusers. We have to strike the balance by advocating for the boy-child the way we advocate for the girl-child.”
Vivour-Adeniyi is not alone. Dayo Adeyemi founder and team lead of Catalyst Men Network, also cautioned in a recent interview with The Nation that the boy-child has for long been neglected just the same way we once neglected the girl-child, arguing that “we are also going to lose the boy-child. And by the time the boy-child would wake up, there is going to be a brutal boomerang.”
CEO of Mind Resurgence Company, Matthew Femi-Adedoyin likes to describe himself as, “first, a husband and a father, a family life coach, a sex recovery consultant and a child psychologist.”He is also of the opinion that society must strike a balance in the fight against sexual abuse of minors. Speaking with The Nation on Sunday, he shared his tale of sexual abuse as a child and how he came out a better man.
According to him, “We live in a society where a part of the society is unfair to the girl-child and a part of the society is unfair to the boy-child. And because there are a lot of empowerment organisations for the girl-child, they forget the boy-child; and the question I always ask is, if you empower this girl-child, who will marry her in the future? Is it not the disempowered boy-child?
Abused at four
Recalled Femi-Adedoyin, his childhood was stolen from him, when at the tender age of four, he began to be abused by a neighbor, a certain aunty. “She must have been around 18 or above, way older than me. In the name of helping my mum take care of me, she began sexually abusing me. In the bathroom, she would ask me to put my mouth on her breast and she would fondle my penis. The abuse continued undetected until we moved out of the compound.” The lady sealed his lips with threats to kill him and his parents if he dared speak out.
Moving from the old house however, didn’t guarantee Femi-Adedoyin’s freedom from sexual abuse. At his grandmother’s place, where he was taken to, a girl his age used him to practise what she saw her parents do at night. “We didn’t actually have penetration, we were caught while we were trying to do all that, but instead of them (the adults) to rebuke us, they started calling us husband and wife.”
By the time he got into secondary school, though he had “started preaching everywhere, in the bus, on the street, in classrooms,” but his sexual urges were already active and alive. He soon met someone older and the abuse continued. “I met a school mother who liked me, played with me, gave me money and took me to her house. Soon, we became very close and one day she innocently kissed me. But because I had been involved in series of abuses in the past, the innocent kiss became a passionate one. Unfortunately, she too had been a victim of series of abuse, so two victims of abuse met, got their urges rekindled and one day, they had sex. She was 18 and he was 12.
“She passed out of my school but didn’t gain admission immediately, so the sex continued in her house for the next three years. On the third year, she gained admission, and it was then at 15, with nobody to perpetrate the act with, that I realised I had become addicted.”
By the time he got into the university, he had slept with several girls, became ardent at masturbating and done pornography. But a time came in his life when he knew he “needed a change of mindset. One day, I met someone that gave me a book, “The psychology of sex”. After reading the book, I saw a step-by-step approach on how to break free. I started following the steps, and in six months, I could do without sex, masturbation and pornography. That was when I knew I had started breaking free. I abstained for six months, one year, two years, and I started helping people without tools. Sometimes it took up to a year or more before the person broke free. So, when I saw that there are schools that can help me become better, I applied to an online school to become a certified sex therapist. Now, in two weeks or less, I can help somebody break free. I have since been gathering certifications on sex therapy, family life, and child psychology.”
Samuel Johnson (not real name) is another victim who narrated his story. He “was seven or eight, when the abuses started, the abuser was a neighbour, who made out to be the caring aunty who always wanted me to be with her. She was a trusted person, someone in whose care my parents could leave me for as long as they wished. She was about 17 at the time.”
Asked what form the abuse took, the young man hesitated a while before saying, “She went as far as everything you can imagine about sex. It wasn’t that it was close, this was really sexual abuse.”
Johnson had other abusers apart from the ‘caring’ neighbour. “There was this lady in my uncle’s place. I used to go there for holidays. She was a neighbour to my uncle, and she took a liking to me. Hers started when she began undressing in my presence. You can imagine a matured lady undressing before me, me who had already been exposed to sexuality before then. And then another round of abuse started. This happened every damn holiday, and continued for many years. I was about age 13 and she was around 26.”
The turning point for Johnson came when he was about age 18. He believes strongly that his freedom from sexual depravity was divine. “You know when you’re becoming 17-19, sometimes it’s always difficult to break-off. The break-off for me started when I was 17. I got committed in church, and it became clear to me that I couldn’t continue in the addiction. The realities of life began to dawn on me and the word of God I’d heard all those years began to make sense to me. It was at this point my freedom from the effect of sexual abuse began. For me, my saving grace was my belief in God. It was God that helped me.”
Speaking further on the reality of sexual abuse against the boy-child, Femi-Adedoyin said, “I have had many males come to me for help to break addictions in masturbation and pornography, and they were introduced to these vices as children. There’s one boy I will never forget. I met him when he was in SS2. He shared his boyhood story of how an uncle in the compound he lived serially invited children into his room and slotted pornography videos for them to watch. After that, he would ask the children to practice what they had watched, boy to girl. He usually blackmailed them with threats of shutting them out of his room, and stuffs like he would not give them money.
“Why did this boy open up? We went to their school to teach sexuality education for one month. At the end of our session, we told them to write down a secret they had never shared with anyone. We asked them not to write their names on the paper to make them know their secret was safe. So, he was able to bare his mind. That’s to let you know that as we are talking, a boy-child is suffering sexual abuse.”
Demystifying the myth
For many years, issues of sexual abuse of minors was like a taboo and hardly discussed, whether openly or secretly. Mothers whose husbands were abusing their daughters found it difficult to speak up, parents whose daughters were abused by neighbours, teachers, or even pastors, quietly swept these issues under the carpet. It was unheard of to speak of such shameful acts in public.
Things are however changing, with many sensitisations being carried out by government and non-governmental organisations. There is now an increased awareness that sexual abuse of minors is a vice that must be stopped short. More worrisome is the apparent neglect of the boy-child, partly because the society hardly look his way when sexual abuse is the topic. As a result, a lot of people are yet to awaken to the reality of this vice. Even the media is complicit and guilty of under-reporting it.
Silence culture fueling sexual abuse of boy-child
It is commonly believed that men don’t talk and they don’t express emotions, so as not to be perceived as weaklings. Boys too tend to be quite like their adult counterpart, though sometimes out of fear and other reasons ranging from a desire to keep enjoying gratifications that come from the abuser or because they don’t feel free enough to discuss sexual issues with their parents or other responsible adults around them. Inevitably, this fuels the abuse and eventually wrecks the child.
Reacting to this, Adeyemi said, “The greatest fear of any woman is the fear of rejection, while the greatest fear of any man is the fear of shame. Men hate not to be seen as courageous. Anything that brings shame to us, we try to run away because we don’t want shame. Moreover, there’s a functional masculinity that sees men as very strong. Today, I can tell you men can be physically very strong, mentally productive, but an emotional wreck. But society has taught him never to cry. And so the man whose emotion is on motion is stultified, because his daddy has told him big boys don’t cry.
“If something happens to a boy, he is unable to express his emotions because his parents shut him down with words like, ‘are you not a man? Stop behaving like a woman.’ And that codification has been knocked into the subconscious of the boy-child.
Femi-Adedoyin believes that the culture of silence has been put upon the male specie by the society. “Our society has taught people that boys should not cry, should not show emotions, so the boy is dying inside and is forming macho. When a boy is crying, you hear people rebuke him for behaving like a woman. We are the ones forming a culture of silence in the boy child, even as we encourage the girl child to speak out. I think our society will do well by not telling the boy child to be a man and not to show emotions.”
Parents negligence and lack of communication, major factors
Parents have a huge role to play in protecting the boy-child from sexual abuse. All the sources that spoke to Sunday Nation, maintained that communicating with your children is very key in protecting them from sexual predators. According to Dr A. O. Coker, a clinical psychologist and consultant psychiatrist at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), “In a good home, if you train your daughter well, and an uncle tries to abuse her, the girl will report the uncle there and then. So, girls that come from very good family background most likely would report an abuse. Girls and boys that cannot actually communicate with their parents would find it difficult to report to their parents that an uncle is sexually abusing them, and then the abuse continues. And it could go on forever until they are caught.”
Just as is being done with the girl-child, Dr Coker says “get closer to your son, educate him that when an older person touches your private parts, report to us. Fortunately, it’s getting better now. I communicate with my children, but our parents did not. Parents should communicate with their children so that children can be their friends.”
Femi-Adedoyin on his part believes that abuse is made possible when parents are absent and not fully involved in the lives of their children. “I had absentee parents who left the house when we were yet to wake up and didn’t return until we had gone to bed. They were not available to even talk to. My parents’ absence, their being too hard on us and our fear of them made the abuse possible.”
His advice to parents is that “Children need their presence more than their presents. There are four ways you can abuse children – verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and abuse by negligence. Most parents abuse their children by negligence.”
Johnson, who like Femi-Adedoyin revealed that his parents knew nothing of the sexual abuses he suffered as a child, has this counsel for parents, “Don’t trust people so much, especially with your children, whether male or female. People tend to talk more about protecting the female child, but the male child also needs protecting. It could be your maid or that neighbour that you need to protect your children from.” Additionally, he advised parents to demystify sex for their children by giving them proper sex education.
Parents must also know the signs to look out for. Adeyemi says your child may have been sexually abused when he has nightmares or other sleep problems without an explanation, seems distracted or distant at odd times, and has a sudden change in eating habits; sudden mood swings, rage, fear, insecurity or withdrawal and keeps secrets, or leaves “clues” that seem likely to provoke a discussion about sexual issues… refuses to talk about a secret shared with an adult or older child, suddenly has money or starts to steal money, exhibits adult-like sexual behaviours, language and knowledge, asks other children to behave sexually or plays sexual games, mimics adult-like sexual behaviours.”
Send pedophiles to the psychiatrists not prisons
Coker believes pedophilia should not be criminalised and that punitive measures don’t work for pedophiles. “They should be sent to the psychiatrist or the psychologist. Punitive measures don’t even cure this thing. They should be rehabilitated. His argument is that an adult that “decides to talk to an underage girl does so because he hasn’t got enough self-confidence to approach an adult lady. He would prefer to talk to the young ones that he can use material things to attract.
“Pedophilia is actually classified as a mental disorder. It is more of a psychological disorder than a criminal case. That’s why you see a teacher abusing his pupil or a pastor abusing some children in the church, or a father having an incest relationship with the daughter. They need psychological help.”
Instead of sending pedophiles to prison where they will go and “acquire more skills” to further perpetrate their vice, Coker advocates that they be treated as mental cases and rehabilitated.
Stemming the tide
All parties spoken to agreed that it is a task that requires all hands to be on deck – be it the family, the school, the church and even the media. According to Coker, “There has to be continuous public education, awareness, advocacy and enlightenment programmes for parents to educate their children. If somebody is trying to touch your breast or trying to be overfamiliar with you, come and tell me. The child must also know that there will be some advances from adults.
“I think there’s a lot of public awareness and advocacy that needs to take place, and that is where NGOs must come in. Community leaders must talk about it, spiritual leaders must talk about it in churches and mosques. For example, if the General Overseer that speaks to up to 3million people at a camp meeting can talk about it, that will have a lot of mileage. NGOs too must keep on making a lot of noise about it. We need to go to primary and secondary schools to tell the boys that this is happening and if it has happened to you, go and report.”
In Adeyemi’s opinion, “Anything that is sensational sells with the media. If we are able to get a story of a dog that had sex with a man, it’s going to blow; but if you say a boy of 16 is raped by a woman of 36, before you know it, people begin to say he enjoyed it. We have been wired to believe that sex is not mutual, the man enjoys sex. So, when it comes to sex education, we are preparing our curriculum and media along that line, along sensation. How do you feel when it is reported that a man of 52 rapes a girl of seven? It sells the newspapers.
“NGOs, the society, the media, and the government must, as a matter of urgency, put up a comprehensive curriculum that deals with the non-academic side of education; number one, anger management. I have never seen any university where they are taught anger management but this hidden anger is what propels either a man to beat his wife to death or a woman to commit an abusive behaviour.
“So, how do we create awareness? We all must come together on board. Getting support for the boy-child project is a herculean task. In creating awareness, we all need to jointly work together. Organisations must also put in money for the boy-child project, because if we don’t raise the boy-child, tomorrow, one Evans who is a kidnapper or one Vampire in the East will kill 200 people. Most of the people we see in government today is a function of boys not well raised, who turned out to be leaders. If you cannot go out and get this done, please support organisations like ours, focused on transforming the boy-child, so that the girl-child, the family and the society can have peace.
Boy child abuse: A potential time-bomb
Sexual Violence Response Team (DSVRT), using inmates in Ikoyi Prisons and Kirikiri Prisons, incarcerated for sexual molestation and child abuse, as samples, revealed that many of them suffered sexual violations as young children.
‘The data gathered through analysis from semi-structured interviews and questionnaires from 131 male sex offenders with participants aged 18 and above drawn from different local government areas of Lagos State, revealed that 80.9 percent of inmates were abused as a child, an indication that they had become sexually active at an early age. The data further shows that some inmates lost their virginity to family members and older acquaintances who took advantage of them during their early teenage years.’
Reacting to this finding, Femi-Adedoyin, recalled when he almost indulged in sexual abuse of a minor. “It is very possible. I was almost becoming an abuser too. I remember a scenario, which is one of the things I truly regret till date. What helped me not to abuse that girl was church mindset. There was this beautiful little girl In my compound, who called me uncle. One day on the staircase, I put her on my lap and started touching her nipples, she didn’t have breasts. It suddenly occurred to me that this was wrong, so I stood her up and sent her away. That was the only time, but if not that I was a church boy and God was changing me, I would have become a serial abuser by now, maybe a rapist, because an abused child has the tendency of abusing someone else.”
Johnson, however does not believe that the abused-abuser factor applies to every victim of sexual abuse. “No. this is not the case always. As an individual, I later understood what abuse was, and knew where to draw the line. The major thing sexual abuse did to me was that it made me attracted to older ladies and fearless to approach them.”
Even experts have varying thoughts on the abused-abuser theory. Adeyemi, while stating that there is no scientific backing to whether someone who suffered abused as a child would grow up an abuser, noted, “However, the psychological part of it is this: whatever you have undergone, especially when it’s ingrained in your subconscious, could become your way of life. It’s like the girl-child whose mother is unduly wicked to her. She’s also going to grow up believing that wickedness, being harsh and extremely strict is the way of motherhood. The same thing applies in what we call behavioural cycle. If you’re abused or sexually violated, you’re likely going to see it as normal. There’s what we call the Oedipus subconscious. Human memory is never wiped off; you only need something to trigger it.”
Not a one-way thing
Dr A. O. Coker, a clinical psychologist and consultant psychiatrist at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) completely negated the abused-abuser theory. “You mean someone that was abused by a pedophile now grows up, and you think he will be abusing minors? It’s not done. It doesn’t happen like that. I mean, if me, a young man was abused at the age of four by a woman who is 34, do you think I will grow up and begin abusing minors? It’s not a one way thing.”
He believes that “girls usually make themselves available to pedophiles, because pedophiles offer them chocolates and money and they enjoy the company of the pedophile. It is when they are caught that the girl now realises that she was actually being abused.”
Speaking about the way men perceive sexual violations, Coker said, “Men basically don’t see it as trauma; they enjoy it. Boys that are being abused by older women enjoy it. It’s the same thing I said about the girls who suffer abuse by older men, they enjoy it. Boys also enjoy it because they benefit from the older women. So, both companies enjoy it.
