DAKAR, Senegal — A brand new legislation punishing baby rapists with castration and dying has come into power in a Nigerian state.
Males convicted of raping kids underneath age 14 could have their testicles surgically eliminated earlier than being executed, underneath laws that the governor of Kaduna state signed on Wednesday. Girls could have their fallopian tubes reduce out.
Many Nigerians clamoring for motion within the face of a national rape disaster have greeted the brand new legislation enthusiastically, however critics say it’s a populist transfer incompatible with the nation’s Structure. They predict it should result in fewer rapes being reported.
Kaduna’s governor, Nasir el-Rufai, stated the new measures have been “required to assist additional defend kids from a critical crime.” Why rapists could be castrated if they’re then going be executed was not instantly clear.
These convicted of raping folks over age 14 additionally face castration, adopted by life imprisonment underneath the brand new laws.
The Kaduna authorities is the one one in West Africa to undertake such harsh punishment for rape, however castration has been tried elsewhere.
The Czech Republic gives voluntary surgical castration to violent intercourse offenders. And several other American states have authorized provisions for chemical castration, which makes use of a drug to cut back testosterone ranges and isn’t everlasting. Indonesia authorized chemical castration in 2016.
Earlier this week, Pakistan’s president steered that rapists and baby molesters be castrated; initially, he stated they need to be hanged, however then fearful this would possibly have an effect on the nation’s buying and selling relationship with the European Union.
In Nigeria, the minister for girls’s affairs stated final December that two million ladies and ladies have been raped within the nation annually. Then in June she stated that the variety of rapes had spiked to 3 instances the standard fee, as a result of ladies and ladies have been locked down with their abusers through the coronavirus pandemic.
The identical month, Nigerian governors declared that the degrees of sexual and gender-based violence in opposition to ladies and ladies constituted a state of emergency.
Lately, Nigerian ladies have more and more been coming forward with accusations of rape. Final yr, the alleged rape of a 7-year-old in Kaduna caused widespread outrage.
However those that communicate out danger being dismissed, or worse.
“The reality is, the ache of ladies and ladies — together with the form of ache attributable to sexual violence — merely isn’t an enormous deal in Nigeria,” OluTimehin Adegbeye, a Nigerian author, lamented in a recent Op-Ed article in The New York Occasions.
Some studies have steered that surgically castrated intercourse offenders are unlikely to reoffend.
However one Nigerian lawyer and activist, Chidi Odinkalu, stated the legislation would possibly make it even more durable to cut back sexual assault in his nation.
A lot rape in Nigeria, as elsewhere, takes place inside marriage. Socially, Mr. Odinkalu stated, ladies and ladies could be “toast” of their households and communities in the event that they reported their husbands for a criminal offense that carries the punishment of castration, and so they are going to be much less more likely to come ahead.
“You’re going to get fewer circumstances of rape and sexual violence reported,” he stated, asking, “What’s flawed with life imprisonment?”
Mr. Odinkalu described the brand new legislation as “legislative sadism.”
With 3.5 million child brides, Nigeria has one of many highest charges of kid marriage on this planet. It’s unclear how the legislation will probably be utilized in circumstances of kid marriage, which is particularly frequent throughout its northern states.
When one Nigerian official was accused of marrying an Egyptian 13-year-old in 2010, he defended himself by saying that the Prophet Muhammad “did marry a younger woman, as properly.”
That official, Ahmad Sani Yerima, has stated he’ll run for president in Nigeria’s subsequent election.
