Though some people claim that it is given impetus by the hype of social media and the stampede to report such, we should all be bothered by now about the cancerous spread of rape cases in Nigeria.
It has assumed such a frightening dimension, even epidemic proportion, that every right-thinking member of society should know that the female gender is faced with a huge threat by a colony of sexual locusts whose proboscis is sharpened to devour.
If you open the newspapers, scroll pages of social media threads or tune to broadcast stations, you will find out how deafening the shouts of cases of rapes are. In the last one week, for example, ranging from Uwaila Omozua, the 100-level student raped to death in a church in Benin, to Barakat Bello, raped to death in Ibadan, among others have trended embarrassingly.
Some people claim that there has actually been no implosion of rape figures but that the figures are given wider publicity as a result of the implosion of media outlets and the access to them by individuals. What they say in essence is that we have always been living with rapists as a people since even pre-colonial time. Being a chauvinistic society where the male gender could do no wrong, many of these animalistic cases were buried in shrouds of culture.
Increasing awareness has however caught up with the decadence of the past and the animals among us are getting exposed to the chagrin of the rest of us. The idleness, indolence and hopelessness of a COVID-19 world have further brought out the beasts in us, which are funneled out through many media routes. Crimes and rape are the outlets through which these animal behaviors are expressed.
What can we do as a society to tame this beastly rape activities? Methinks the first thing to do is to acknowledge that we have a social emergency on our hands in these imploding rape cases. After this, we should make public examples of rapists. This is being well-handled in Ekiti States, among the states of Nigeria, where Governor Kayode Fayemi and his wife are pioneering a regime of shaming and naming methodologies through law, where these dammed lots among us are disgraced and socially castrated.
The next step is to ensure that rape and rapists attract societal isolation and blacklist, such that perpetrators and their families get to swallow what looks like hemlock of the Socratic era. The next step is to strictly pursue jail terms for all rapists.
When there is a collective system of demonizing the beasts in human skins called rapists among us, we will be on our way to getting our freedom from their menace.
