Author(s): Halima Ali Buratai
Rape is considered as a heartrending moment in a woman’s or girl’s life, it is reality but remain hidden to appropriate authority due to certain distress associated with stigma against the survivor, fear of victimization, cultural barrier, religious sentiments, shame influential, and lack of cognizance on human right. Rape is simply when sexual intercourse occur without ones consent (not willing) or force a person to have sexual intercourse against his/her will, it happen when someone is intoxicated from alcohol or drugs and sometimes for ritual purpose. It can be through vagina, anus or mouth. In northern Nigeria, rape is defined under section 282 of the panel code as. (a) Any act of rape against her will, (b) obtained by putting her fear, threats or death, (iii) with her consent when the man knows that he is not her husband and that her concern is given because she believes that he is the man who to whom she is or believe herself to be lawfully married to, (iv) with or without her consent when she is under fourteen years of age. The main objective of this paper is to examine the following. Why do men rape? How does rape harm victims psychologically? , What should I do if I have been raped? How can I protect myself from rape? What is the best way to prevent STD. Rape as felony, is among the most serious crime a person can commit, men as well as women and children can be raped. This paper will seek an answer to the above questions and provide some recommendations which will be of great importance to social agencies, survivors, parents and security agencies
Gender based violence, particularly sexual violence, is a wide spread and alarming elements of the current crisis .women and girls are more vulnerable, it’s now encompasses both sexes. The Boko Haram, formally targeting women and girls, uses sexual violence as a tactics of terror. Those living in the north eastern Nigeria precisely Borno and Yobe where security situation is porous were at risk of rights violations, abduction, sexual slavery, rape, torture and abuse. As displacement becomes protracted, families resort to negative coping mechanisms under the strain of prolonged uncertainty and diminishing resources. For instance women and girls are subject to increasing restrictions that, while meant to protect them, in the effects of livelihood opportunities and undermine their social position.
Every 6 out of 10 female reported to have experienced one or more forms of sexual violence in insurgent areas in the North East. SGBV and specifically cases of sexual violence have become the highlight of this conflict and humanitarian situation. Africa has the highest prevalence rate of child sexual abuse. As at 2004, 60% of children involve in child trafficking from Africa to Europe were Nigerians and between 2012 and 2013 about 30 % of women in Nigeria experienced one form of domestic violence or another.
In recent times. The case of rape in Nigeria has become quite alarming and threatening and requires urgent intervention, it is no longer a solitude criminal act affecting just few women in the society. With the rights, privacy, infringed upon by this social menace with little or no policy to protect the rights of this victims, this is a wakeup call to the government to proffer solution to curb this issue
Rape victims were emotionally scarred by their experience: they became anxious about dating, and even about going out in public. They mostly had trouble sleeping, eating and concentrating on exertion. Indeed, like some war troupers, rape victims often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, in which symptoms such as anxiety, memory loss, obsessive thoughts and emotional shock linger after a deeply disturbing experience. In 1992 survey of American women aged eighteen and older, 13 percent of the respondents reported having been the victim of at least one rape, where rape was defined as unwelcome oral, anal or vaginal penetration achieved through the use or threat of force. Surely, eradicating sexual violence is an issue that modern society should make a top priority.
Thormhill and palmer response (2003) posit that, individual rapists may have a variety of motivations. A man may rape because, for instance, he wants to impress his friends by losing his virginity, or because he wants to avenge himself against a woman who has spurned him. But social scientists have not convincingly demonstrated that rapists are not at least partly motivated by sexual desire as well. Indeed, how could a rape take place at all without sexual motivation on the part of the rapist? Isn’t sexual arousal of the rapist the one common factor in all rapes, including date rapes, rapes of children, and rapes of women under anesthetic and even gang rapes committed by soldiers during war?
No one can deny that being raped is one of the upsetting and derisive experience that one could have it almost always leaves the victims with feelings of self-loathing, self-blame and range, and can cause post traumatic syndrome (PSTD). The risk of sexual violence one assumes just by living while female is high. According to the CDC, one in the three women in United States have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact at some point in their lives. Considering that sexual violence against women is by all account under reported, the actual number may be higher. The attackers almost exclusively, are men.
Reason, mentioned which may strike some erroneously as flippant, is because they can. By biological lot, men are on average bigger and stronger than women and can overpower them physically. “Anatomy is destiny”, said Sigmund Freud, and it is indeed grim destiny that a man who wishes to imposed his will on a woman often has the means of physical force available to him
Another reason sexual violence is so common is that sex and violence is so common and closely linked in our internal architecture. Psychologically, sex contain violent undertones and vice versa Richard von Krafft-Ebing was one of the first people to explore the reasons behind rape. In his book Psychopathic Sexualis Thormhill he assumed that rapists might be suffering from ‘a mental weakness’ to lust that causes them to lose control with women. Later Havelock Ellis believed that rape was a natural manifestation of male sexual desire, which was, by default, violent and predatory. These are the kind of notions that support rape culture at large: the onus was on women to defend themselves from dangerous men
Following the surge of feminism, researchers began to investigate into the reasons behind rape in the late seventies. These early studies used prisoners as samples, which meant that their results were lopsided: the vast majority of rapists were never jailed. Subsequently, in the 1980s, researchers now targeted ‘undetected’ rapists: men who hadn’t been arrested or reported for rape. This revealed a new dimension: 10 different studies between 1985 and 1998 revealed that around 6-14.9% of male college students in the US admitted to rape or attempted rape. Around half of this figure also admitted to multiple instances of rape. They were interviewed using questionnaires that used phrasing such ‘as without consent’ to talk about the subject, because past experience had suggested that while people may agree to having nonconsensual sex, they strongly deny rape
Rape can be understood as a way to gain access to females. There are variety of women. Asserted that a victim’s dress and behavior should affect the degree of punishment meted out to the rapist: thus if the victim was dressed provocatively, she several mechanisms by which such a strategy could function. For example, men might resort to rape when they are socially disenfranchised, and thus unable to gain access to women through looks, wealth or status. Alternatively, men could have evolved to practice rape when the costs seem low--when, for instance, a woman is alone and unprotected (and thus retaliation seems unlikely), or when they have physical control over a woman (and so cannot be injured by her). Over evolutionary In spite of protestations to the contrary, women should also be advised that the way they dress can put them at risk. In the past, most discussions of female appearance in the context of rape have, entirely unfairly, time, some men may have succeeded in passing on their genes through rape, thus perpetuating the behavior. It is also possible, however, that rape evolved not as a reproductive strategy in itself but merely as a side effect of other adaptations, such as the strong male sex drive and the male desire to mate with a “had it coming to her”--and the rapist would get off lightly. But current attempts to avoid blaming the victim have led to false propaganda that dress and behavior have little or no influence on a woman’s chances of being raped. As a consequence, important knowledge about how to avoid dangerous circumstances is often suppressed. Surely the point that no woman’s behavior gives a man the right to rape her can be made with-out encouraging women to overlook the role they themselves may be playing in compromising their safety.
Until relatively recently in Europe and the United States, strict social taboos kept young men and women from spending unsupervised time together, and in many other countries young women are still kept cloistered away from men. Such physical barriers are understandably abhorrent to many people, since they greatly limit the freedom of women. But the toppling of those barriers in modern Western countries raises problems of its own. The common practice of unsupervised dating in cars and private homes, which is often accompanied by the consumption of alcohol, has placed young women in environments that are conducive to rape to an extent that is probably unparalleled in history. After studying the data on the risk factors for rape, the sex investigators Elizabeth R. Allgeier and Albert R. Allgeier, both of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, recommended that men and women interact only in public places during the early stages of their relationships--or, at least, that women exert more control than they generally do over the circumstances in which they consent to be alone with men.
These may be instantly obviously if the assailant has used violence during the assault and may need immediate hospital treatment. However, it is also worth considering physical effects that might arise in the future such as sexual transmitted infections, emotional numbness, fear, embarrassment and shame, guilt, depression, recurrent dreams and nightmares among others.
While fear of rape is typically associated with being outside the home, the great majority of sexual violence actually occurs in the home of the victim or the abuser. Nonetheless, abduction by a stranger is quite often the prelude to a rape and the opportunities for such an abduction are influenced by the physical environment. The social environment within a community is, however, usually more important than the physical surrounding. How deeply entrenched in a community beliefs in male superiority and male entitlement to sex will greatly affect the likelihood of sexual violence taking place, as will the general tolerance in the community of sexual assault and the strength of sanctions, if any, against perpetrators For instance, in some places, rape can even occur in public, with passersby refusing to intervene, Complaints of rape may also be treated leniently by the police, particularly if the assault is committed during a date or by the victim’s husband.
Rape is more distressing for women than are other violent crimes, and evolutionary theory can help explain that as well. In recent years research on human unhappiness informed by evolutionary theory has developed substantial evidence about the functional role of psychological pain. Such pain is thought to be an adaptation that helps people guard against circumstances that reduce their reproductive success; it does so by spurring behavioral changes aimed at preventing future pain [see “What Good Is Feeling Bad?” by Randolph M. Nesse, November/December 1991]. Thus one would expect the greatest psychological pain to be associated with events that lower one’s reproductive success, and, indeed, emotionally traumatic events such as the death of a relative, the loss of social status, desertion by one’s mate and the trauma of being raped can all be interpreted as having that effect.
Rape reduces female reproductive success in several ways. For one thing, the victim may be injured. Moreover, if she becomes pregnant, she is deprived of her chance to choose the best father for her children. A rape may also cause a woman to lose the investment of her long-term partner, because it calls into question whether the child she later bears is really his. A variety of studies have shown that both men and women care more for their genetic offspring than for stepchildren.
Analysis of the data showed that young women suffered greater distress after a rape than did children or women who were past reproductive age. That finding makes evolutionary sense, because it is young women who were at risk of being impregnated by an undesirable mate. Married women, moreover, were more traumatized than unmarried women, and they were more likely to feel that their future had been harmed by the rape. That, too, makes evolutionary sense, because the doubt a rape sows about paternity can lead a long-term mate to withdraw his support. Among the women in the study, psychological pain rose inversely to the violence of the attack. In other words, when the rapist exerted less force, the victim was more upset afterward. Those findings, surprising at first, make sense in the evolutionary context: a victim who exhibits physical evidence that sexual access was forced may have less difficulty convincing her husband or boyfriend that what took place was rape rather than consensual sex. In evolutionary terms, such evidence would be reassuring to a pair-bonded male, because rape is a one-time event, whereas consensual sex with other partners is likely to be frequent, and thus more threatening to paternity.
Finally, women of reproductive age reported more emotional distress when the assault involved sexual intercourse than when it involved other kinds of sexual behavior. Among young girls and older women, however, penile-vaginal intercourse was no more upsetting than other kinds of assaults. Again, the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy may be a key factor in the degree of trauma the victim experiences.
For all those reasons, the psychological pain that rape victims suffer appears to be an evolved defense against rape. The human females who out reproduced others--and thus became our ancestors--were people who were highly distressed about rape. Their distress presumably served their interests by motivating them to identify the circumstances that resulted in the rape, assess the problems the rape caused, and act to avoid rapes in the future.
In places like northern Nigeria rape case were not exposed because most parents believes that the incident will affects the reputation of their family, stigmazation, discrimination, it is also regarded as a shameful act which will result to ruining the image of the girl child and eventually leads to ending up without getting a life partner. With the rampant cases of rape in the region, government and NGOs were working in partnership with the ministry of health to provide SGBV centers in hospitals to take charge of victims of sexual assaults. The centers were charged with responsibilities of treating rape victims, councilling of traumatized victims, sensitization of both victims and their parents on the implications and dangers of undisclosed rape case which may results to unwanted pregnancy, sexual transmitted diseases, trauma which may extensively leads to depression among others.
If a victim believe she was raped, it’s important to remember that what happened isn’t their fault. Victims don’t have to go through this experience alone. They decide what, they want to do next. Whatever they do is their choice. No one can or should force them to make any decision they aren’t comfortable with. A sexual assault forensic examination, or a “rape kit,” is a way for specially trained healthcare providers to collect possible evidence. This process allows them to gather DNA and materials from victim’s clothes, victim’s body, and belongings. If the survivor decide later to press charges, this could come in handy. However, it’s important for the quality of the kit survivors don’t shower, change clothes, or otherwise alter their appearance from the time of the assault to the time of collection. Doing so may accidentally remove valuable evidence if they have to decide, they want to press charges right away. They can also talk to a law enforcement officer or representative regardless of whether they want to press charges. They can explain the process and connect with an advocate or other resources. Getting answers to any questions they may have can help them decide what they want to do. They may have questions about your legal options after a rape. Survivors may want to discuss the process of filing a report and pressing charges. Legal counselors can help them with these questions. They may also join them in court if their case goes to trial. Some legal resources are free. Others may cost money, but many are willing to provide assistance at a reduced cost to sexual assault survivors.
The feminist theory of male-female rape is summarized by Susan Brownmiller’s statement: “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Some feminists assert that male domination of women in socio-political and economic domains is the ultimate cause of most rapes, and consider male-female rape to be a crime of power that has little or nothing to do with sex itself. However, a 1983 study comparing 14 indicators of male dominance and the incidence of rape in 26 American cities found no correlations, except one where greater male dominance actually decreased the incidence of rape. Social learning theory of rape is similar to the feminist theory and links cultural traditions such as imitation, sex-violence linkages, rape myths, e.g. (“women secretly desire to be raped”), and desensitization to be the core causes of rape.
Sexually transmitted diseases or infections (STDs or STIs) affect tens of millions Trusted Source of people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Men, and others with penises, such as pre-op transgender women, may not realize they’ve acquired an STD, because many have no symptoms. However, that doesn’t mean that STDs aren’t affecting their health. Not all STDs have symptoms, but when they occur in people with a penis, they can include:
• pain or burning during urination • a need to urinate more frequently • pain during ejaculation • abnormal discharge from the penis, particularly colored or foul-smelling discharge • bumps, blisters, or sores on the penis or genitals
STDs can affect anyone who’s sexually active, regardless of their age, race, or sexual orientation. However, many STDs are highly preventable. Abstinence is the only foolproof method to protect against STDs. However, by being aware of changes in your body and practicing safer sex, you can protect yourself and your partners.
Consistently using condoms and other barrier methods makes transmission less likely. STDs can be transmitted through vaginal, oral, and anal sex. It’s important to practice safer sex during all sexual activities. Condoms can be used for vaginal, oral, and anal sex. Dental dams and other barriers can be used for any type of oral sex. Many people believe that oral sex is risk-free. However, numerous STDs can be transmitted during oral sex, including syphilis, herpes, and gonorrhea. Some STDs are transmitted more easily during anal sex. These STDs may be more common in men who have sex with men. No matter the sexual orientation, one should take good care of your sexual health by always having safer sex and being regularly tested for STDs.
Regular testing is a good idea if one is not in a long-term, mutually monogamous relationship. Although safer sex is good at reducing STD transmission, it’s not perfect. Regular testing is the best way to take charge of sexual health. It’s important to ask doctor for STD testing. One must inquire for STDs at annual physical exam, but if no any request made (you don’t ask,) it’s may not be tested. Even if the doctor does the test, it may not be given every test you want — there aren’t good screening tests for every STD. one should request STD tests at every physical, but should also visit a testing center anytime you’ve had unprotected sex (especially if you believe your partner may have an STD).
This paper has discussed issues related to rape and the reasons for rape in the study area, also discussed are the effect of rape to the society and the family. Rape as felony, is among the most serious crime a person can commit, men as well as women and children can be raped. Rape cause a lot of psychological and mental challenges to the victim thereby eloping them of their right and privileges in the society. This paper answered questions raised in the cause of the research and provide some recommendations which will be of great importance to social agencies, survivors, parents and security agencies [1-6].
- creating programmes to empower and support women and girls thereby strengthening economic supports and leadership opportunities for girls
- supporting victims or survivors to lessen harms by providing victims centered service, treatments for victims of rape and treatment for at risk children and families to prevents problem behavior including sex offending
- government, cannot handle the issue of rape and prevention alone, portfolios across all levels of governments including education, heath, justice, and crime prevention as well as the non-governmental organizations and community stakeholders, each have significant contribution to make.
