In June 2020, the governors of Nigeria’s 36 states declared a state of emergency on rape. The Nigerian Governor’s Forum took action after women’s group spoke out following the brutal rape of students including Uwaila Vera Omozuwa, who died after being attacked in a church on May 27.
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According to a 2014 UNICEF study, at least 25% of Nigerian girls have been sexually assaulted before the age of 18 — though it is a crime that has long been woefully underreported. “The truth is, the pain of women and girls — including the kind of pain caused by sexual violence — simply isn’t a big deal in Nigeria,” OluTimehin Adegbeye wrote in a September 4 Op-ed in The New York Times titled, “Nothing Happens When Women Are Raped in Nigeria.”
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Adegbeye continued, “If anything, generalized female pain is a fundamental aspect of our social order. The more abuse a woman is able to meekly accept, the more virtue she is accorded by the people around her. And those who speak out against abuse are put back in their place.”
Such conditions make it all the more important to speak out and challenge the status quo, humanize the victims, center their stories, and advocate for restorative justice. In the series “Legal Rape,” Nigerian photographer and social activist Emeke Obanor does just this. By creating a series of collaborative portraits with survivors, Obanor creates a space to consider women and girls as individuals worthy of the basic rights and protections afforded to all.
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The only way to create change it to dismantle pathological behaviors that have been normalized to protect predators from prosecution of their crimes. “The culture aspect includes gender norms that validate men as sexual pursuers and attitudes that view women as sexual conquests by which manhood is legitimized and women are objectified, as sexual objects to be owned, used, consumed, and even sexually abused by the ‘entitled’ male,” Obanor writes in his artist statement.
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“The society on their part undermines the emotional trauma experienced by rape victims and thus become unsympathetic and sees it as a norm…. [Meanwhile] Some of the victims truly suffer uncomfortable memories such as nightmares, flashbacks, suicide thoughts and feelings of guilt. It can also manifest in physical ways, like chronic pain, intestinal problems, muscle cramps, paralyzed vocal cord, or as in TY case, sleep disorder.”
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Recognizing the first step in healing is to break the silence, Obanor works with rape survivors to create a sage space where they can begin to heal in a process that allows them to slowly reclaim their voice and agency. Here, Obanor shares his work as an artist, activist, and advocate as a man speaking back to the patriarchy against the crimes it inflicts.
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