NEWSBYADETOMI ALADEKOMO

Last week a shocking video started making rounds through the Nigerian blogosphere. A fellow blogger sent me an email that contained two videos and a short write-up. Being typically me, I skipped her words and went straight to the videos. I started from the shorter video, it was a clip about ten minutes long and the first words I heard as I started listening were "but am I not cooperating?" The video was grainy and not too clear but the scene before me was quite clear and easy to read. There was a girl and she was being raped. I watched exactly 33 seconds of the video before I realized this.

In this shocking video, the full version of which is a little over an hour long, we see a girl being raped repeatedly by five different men in a dormitory style room. In the beginning of the video we hear her pleading with her captors to let her go and promising she will not tell anyone or make a fuss. Her captors laugh off her pleas and threaten to keep her captive and rape her for two days if she does not "cooperate" with them. We also gather that the rape is her punishment for allegedly insulting one of the five rapists. The rape was recorded and then passed around to their friends, to other students of the university, until finally it made its way into the hands of Linda Ikeji, who in outrage posted it on her blog asking for justice for this poor girl.

I was raped at 17. I have never actually come right out and said it before today to anyone but my closest friends and family but while watching that video, I felt something inside me break. The pain and shame I suffered at the hands of one man seemed to me at the time too unbearable to live with and two months later I tried to take my life. I was unable to watch the entire video because the entire time I kept multiplying what I went through by 5 and then trying to imagine the added humiliation of having an entire campus plus countless of nameless, faceless internet users watch my suffering and despair over and over and over again. I could not. I could only cry and so cry I did. And when I was done crying I realized that I had to do something for this girl that no one did for me. I had to stand up and let my voice be heard. I never reported my rape. In fact, it took me over a year to tell my parents what had prompted me to attempt to take my life that night. My rape occurred seven and a half years ago and I would be lying if I said it did not change my life. Till today I have an extreme fear of being stabbed, having been forced at knifepoint into the bushes. So I decided that this girl would not have to live with the knowledge that her attackers got away with what they did. I decided that somehow I would ensure that, these men faced the consequences of their actions.