The Director General of The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Dame Julie Okah-Donli, has revealed that young boys in Nigeria are currently more susceptible to rape than girls.
She attributed this to the fact that many people tend to focus more on girls being raped and forget that the reality is that the incident of rape for boys in Nigeria is currently on the increase.
She said this at the flag-off of the ‘Cover me’ campaign aimed at exposing perpetrators of child abuse, advocate for stricter punishment for rapists and advocate for stronger mechanisms for preventing approach on Saturday 27 June.
“I do not advocate for capital punishment of death sentence because it will make rapists become brutal because they will not want to leave witnesses and it will also encourage jungle justice with people using it to accuse and kill people falsely.
Boys are more vulnerable to rape because we tend to focus more on girls so we need to focus on all our children. Now you see a lot of silly videos with people sharing and reposting. If you send it to me I will arrest you for child pornography, as anyone who stigmatizes victims will be punished. We need to make people know that we are serious.
During the lockdown, a lot of things where revealed to us, we realized that most of the reports we got were from observant neighbours and not parents,” she said.
Ugo Nwafor, the coordinator Cover Me project, explained that his organisation has set up a one million man online petition to implement capital punishment to stop rape, child defilement, and child abuse in the country.
He said that capital punishment is implemented to curb rape, defilement, and abuse by 60 per cent.
He said that the Cover Me project will also embark on the distribution of clothing items to children in rural areas all over the country because they believe that the constant nudity of little children in rural areas might also encourage pedophile.
