The Nigerian Child: Face to Face With Abuse

these slave masters are Deacons/Deaconesses and Alfas in our churches and mosques and we pay spiritual homage to them in the name of God.

A lot of children have been made to give confessional statements to spiritualists under duress, and following torture to deliver address on our they have unturned many homes, which turns out to be self-made stories used to justify stagnant family situations.

Children may also be required to hawk in busy roads as an alternative to education in order to generate money for their parents, and when put together, one discovers that collectively, the articles content for sale cannot worth more than N500.00 (Five Hundred Naira) or consider the case of a small girl who hawks several number of large tuber of yams which even his parents cannot lift from the ground, when she is tired of walking and as result decides to sleep by the road side is raped by a number of unidentified gangs or lured away for ritual purposes, having some of her private parts removed for this purpose.

In this era also, we find many Nigerian children who act as guide to beggars, in most cases it is hard to tell how related they are to these beggars because they are rarely seen conversing except when they are both tired and resting, funny enough, when they are set to go home, commercial bus drivers rarely show the urge or intention to convey them with their buses because as beggars, they are seen as people incapable of affording the fares. Sometimes bus conductors attempt pushing them off their vehicles for the reason stated her.

Many men lure young female hawkers to their houses or elsewhere where their articles are bought up by giving them money equivalent to these articles and engage in sex with them with or without their consent. Our culture gets these victims to keep quiet and not make any disclosures to their parents because they may end up receiving many more torture from their parents.

Not sending children to school may also mean sending them to gambling centers where they mix up with adults of different kinds obtaining different gambling skills and exhibiting them. This mostly occurs because parents and guardians have failed to give their children proper provisions of supervisions or guardianship, and the child is left with no option than to take to what is available to him/her.

Child abuse in Nigeria may never be a thing of the past until the government intervenes; it is on the basis of this that we call on relevant agencies and child-right activist to help ensure that meaningful life returns to the Nigerian children and that they are not denied the basic right to life. When this is done, children will become happy and contribute their own quota to the development of Nigeria when they are grown.   

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