Kemi Busari
Nobel Laurette Wole Soyinka has called on the judiciary to be steadfast in the prosecution of perpetrators of abuses against the female gender.
Soyinka gave this charge at the 2015 Gender Abuse Conference organized by the Women Arise for Change Initiative in Lagos recently.
The professor said that the laws of the nation is clear on crimes against women and that it should be applied to all irrespective of status.
“The passage towards this final phase of societal evolution is of course, primarily, education and enlightenment. It is however, also deterrence. Where the laws of society are quite clear on the treatment of women, and these are flouted, then the rod of deterrence must apply – without prejudice, and without privilege. This nation cannot claim to be committed to this basic approach, and here is proof, within recent memory.
“In a notorious episode, the nation was confronted with a situation where a lawmaker – and an ex-governor to boot! – brazenly indulged in sex trafficking – in minors! He got away with it with open defiance, despite the hue and cry of the nation – across age, professions and faith. Obviously, such a nation is not to be taken seriously about terminating the phenomenon of gender abuse. Having rendered itself guilty of a collective betrayal of the vulnerable in favour of the powerfully positioned, she loses all moral clout. All that is left are the fitful twitches of an entity in thrall to impunity.”
Soyinka also warns against the use of religious justification mostly employed by the perpetrators saying that it can lead to a total malfunction of the legal system.
“Crimes are committed in increasingly horrendous dimensions against both individual and that corporate entity also called nation, where the supposed sensibilities of the criminal take priority over the rights of the victim, or the duty of the state, once the bogey of religion is introduced. In a multi-religious society – let this be stressed again and again, there can be no privileging of any one religion over another. Any such claim is bogus, arrogant and opportunistic. It constitutes an invitation to a total breakdown of the norms of cohabitation in full equity, an open door to the exercise of despotic group conduct, under pietistic guise.” he said.
He called on government and others in charge fighting against abuses to learn from developed societies who prosecute offenders and apply the law fairly no matter who is involved.
“It is never too late to take lessons from other societies where crimes of gender abuse are being exhumed even after decades, the perpetrators exposed by witness after witness, files dusted up, and the accused hauled up before the courts, stripped of past social status and honours and punished for what they thought were forgotten crimes against the defenseless and – the Future.”
Share this
