When the school teacher is a sexual predator

The recent case of 10 secondary schools students infected with Sexually Transmitted Diseases by their teachers says it all.

Your daughter might not tell if she had been taken to the 'other room' by her English or Mathematics teacher for a ride on a topic in Biology.

Because reproduction is the topic every randy teacher is always interested in discussing with unsuspecting students.

There may be no statistics to support this claim but we have witnessed a preponderance of sexual relationship between teachers and their students.

Some of these have certainly gone unreported, but the two recent examples in Epe and Ekiti show how far rape culture has moved from the dark corners of the streets at nights to empty classrooms in secondary schools after school hours.

Permit me to digress. Some years back, I was in a boarding school along Lagos-Ibadan Expressway to cover the school's end of the year party with the editor of the Magazine I was working for. It was a Church-owned school, which had enough money to invite pressmen to its end of the year events for the sake of publicity.

Before the end of the party, the Parents-Teachers Association Chair was called upon to address the audience and she said "Male teachers, please stop "looking" at these girls, they are still young"

The word 'looking' caught my attention but I reserved my opinion because it would be wrong to judge the male teachers as randy lookers. Still, I believe the statement of the woman, who obviously had a daughter in the school was not a mere conjecture.

So, if the male teachers in a school owned and controlled by a church can 'look' at little girls in the school, how safe are those in secular high schools? These are schools, where plants like banana, cassava or cucumber cannot be mentioned or used for a practical session without a flash of erotic thought in someone's mind.

It is very sad that everything, yes, everything from clothes to foods now has sexual connotations.

Back to the sexual predators who raped their students in Epe and Ekiti.

On Friday, July 1, Vanguard reported that doctors in an undisclosed hospital are treating 10 female students of Lagos State Government Secondary School in Epe for Sexually Transmitted Diseases. These 10 students were allegedly raped by two teachers.

Really? Yes. Two teachers raped 10 students.

It is very depressing!

The randy duo reportedly threatened to fail the students if they refuse to surrender their bodies. The teachers had the fun of their lives taking advantage of the minors and eventually stained them with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

None of the students was aware of what had befallen them until one of them complained to her mother about unusual discharges in her private part and was diagnosed of STDs. Another confided in one of her friends about the same discharges till all the 10 students realised they were all in the same boat.

Similarly,a vice-principal of St. Mary's girl grammar school in Ikole Ekiti was recently sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a 12-year-old girl in 2014.

The vice-principal, Taiwo Ajayi reportedly lured the girl into his office, locked the door from behind and had the canal knowledge of the girl on the table in his office gagging her mouth with a piece of cloth.

A teacher was reported to have knocked on the door when the vice-principal was sexually humiliating the teenager. After 30 minutes, two of the school teachers forced the door open and they caught the 60-year-old pervert in the act.

The school principal might have deservedly gotten the punishment for his inordinate sexual desires, but this is one out of many cases of rapes in the country. How many students or pupils have kept mum and buried their heads in shame because the society sees rape as a stigma?

How many teachers have laid one or two students on a table in an empty classroom or anywhere they consider safe enough to carry out their obnoxious act?

There is no figure for this because our culture is too shy to discuss sex let alone keep rape records. Yet, the few records out there suggest secondary school girls are often exposed to sexual assault in their schools.

The sexual predators in the classrooms have tied the academic success of these young girls to the loins of the girls. The students are threatened to submit their body or risk poor performance that will be orchestrated by the teachers in all their exams.

This is the same narrative hypersexual lecturers sell to threaten girls in polytechnics and universities across the country. While some comply, others choose to face the lecturer's wrath. Only a few expose their lustful tutors.

Another means through which the randy teachers take advantage of the unsuspecting teenage girls are external exams. A lot of young girls have been abused through the General Certificate Examination (GCE) and National Examination Council Exams by their over-sexed teachers and tutorial coordinators.

Many of these girls who didn't pass their West Africa Secondary School Certificate Exams (WASSCE) at one sitting often turn to special centres for their secondary school leaving certificates. These special centres are often run by secondary school teachers.

Students are likely to become desperate to pass exams when they fail the WASSCE at first sitting. At this point, they become desperate to pass GCE, desperate to pass the Unified Tertiary and Matriculation Exams (UTME) and desperate to gain admission into a University.

The pressure that comes with passing UTME and gaining admission into a University could make a young girl, who is trying to find a career path submit herself to the obnoxious requests of randy teachers and tutorial masters who always assure them of scoring 300 and above in UTME.

This is the predicament of many secondary school girls and university admission seekers in Nigeria. Unfortunately, everybody is guilty either of exposing the girl child to sexual assaults or of not protecting the future mothers of the nation well enough.

ALSO READ:Two Teachers raper 10 students infecting them with STDs

A lot of parents have failed to teach their children about sex education because their culture and society say it is a taboo to discuss sex with young girls. And when the girl is assaulted, the same culture and society tell her to keep shut lest she becomes an outcast.

But whether she cries out or not, rape victims would continue to nurse an indelible memory of the horrible experience. So why keep mum to make the head of the rapists swell?

Our government's failure to protect not only the girl child but everybody in the country is woeful enough to win a gold medal in an international competition on negligence.

Cases of sexual assaults in secondary schools cannot be denied. Some might have gone unreported but a few numbers of such stories made headlines. No government in any state has put a law in place to check this menace in secondary and tertiary institutions.

Many lecturers like Dr Seyi Adu of Ogun State College of Health have impregnated a lot of undergraduates and refused to claim responsibility for their pregnancies.

Adu too denied having any sexual affair that could lead to pregnancy between him and Mosunmola, a dental nursing student. But after two months of investigations, Adu was found culpable and was indefinitely suspended by the college panel.

It is high time the government made a law that would flush out teachers and lecturers like Adu from our classrooms.

Moreover, the portrayal and adoration of baby mamas and papas in the media have normalised having kids out of wedlock. Even the church sees no wrong in it anymore.

Also, the presentation and internalisation of food items like cassava, cucumber and banana as sex objects are sending wrong signals to the schools.

And once the academic goat has his way, the society would ask the girl to stay quiet and endure the psychological pain for the rest of her life.

This only breeds more rapists because at the end of the day, the predator would leave the room to boast, while the victim goes home to sob.

Finally, the media, government religion societies and schools should see it as a matter of responsibility to ensure no girl child is made to go through what happens to those 10 girls in Epe again and any teacher found wanton must face the consequence of their actions like Taiwo Ajayi, the randy vice principal.