Nigeria records ‘one rape every five hours’

Nigeria’s Chief of Police has revealed that there were 717 recorded rapes between January and May of this year, amounting to one rape every five hours.

Mohammed Adamu spoke to the press after a meeting with President Buhari in which the two discussed how to tackle Nigeria’s rape crisis.

The police chief said that 799 suspects had been arrested and 631 had appeared in court. He did not reveal the final number of convictions, however, which is thought to be considerably lower.

According to Nigeria’s Bureau of Statistics, 2,279 rape cases were reported in 2017, but 0 convictions were made by the police. A culture of shaming women and insufficient evidence gathering has allowed rape culture to continue unchecked and unpunished in Nigeria for far too long.

There are signs of change, however, as last week the governors of all 36 states in Nigeria declared a state of emergency against rape, calling it a ‘pandemic within a pandemic’. This declaration came after a report stated that numbers of rapes had tripled in lockdown, as vulnerable women and children can no longer escape their abusers.

Social media has been instrumental in taking the government to task for its previously weak response in stopping Nigeria’s rape culture. The hashtag #WeAreTired has circulated widely over Twitter as women demand justice for the murder of Uwavera Omozuwa, a 22-year-old medical student who was brutally raped and murdered in her local church.

Omozuwa’s murder shocked the nation but is not altogether an uncommon story in Nigeria. She was one of four women in recent weeks to have been raped and murdered, all of whom were under 25.  

Photo: EPA