When Adults Fail the Girl Child Multiple Times

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As a Nigerian girl born in Nigeria, you are already minus 100 against life.

You have to hope you are not born into a family where female genital mutilation is the norm. If you escape that, you then have to hope you are born into a family where the men in your life will not sexually assault you, whether that is your father, uncle, brother or another man who is supposed to protect you.

If you manage to escape that, good. But you still have to hope that when something terrible happens to you, the adults who are supposed to protect you will actually protect you instead of turning your pain into an embarrassment or a joke.

That is what I thought about when I watched a video circulating online of two young girls disclosing repeated sexual assault by a man known to them. One of the girls is 13 years old. She described the bleeding, how many times it happened and what the man said to her.

The adults around them made fun of their predicament, laughing and joking, using inappropriate words to describe their experience.

A 13-year-old girl is telling the adults around her that she has been sexually assaulted repeatedly and is bleeding. Instead of listening kindly, protecting her privacy, helping her, and getting her the support she needs, they laughed and made crude jokes at her expense.

This is the part of conversations about sexual violence that we do not talk about enough. We talk about the person who abused the child, and rightly so, but what happens after the child finds the courage to speak also matters.

A child who tells an adult that she has been sexually abused is trusting that adult with something deeply painful. She is trusting them to believe her, keep her safe, and help her make sense of what has happened to her. When that adult laughs, mocks her, uses inappropriate language, records her or shares her story without protecting her identity, the child is being failed again.

And children are watching.

They see what happens to girls who speak. They hear how adults respond when a child says a man has touched her. They see whether she is believed, protected, blamed, mocked or exposed. So when we ask why some children do not speak about sexual abuse, we also have to ask what they have seen happen to children who did.

It is not enough to tell children to speak up when we have not created an environment where speaking is safe.

The adults in that video may not have intended to cause the same kind of harm as the man who sexually assaulted those girls, but their response was still harmful. Laughing while a child describes sexual assault is harmful. Using slang for body parts while she is trying to explain what happened is harmful. Recording her disclosure and putting it online is harmful. Turning the moment into something other people can watch and discuss is harmful.

The child should have been taken somewhere private and safe, listened to calmly, and connected with people who could actually help her. Her medical needs should have been addressed, the abuse should have been reported to the appropriate authorities, and her identity should have been protected.

Now thousands of people can watch a record of a moment when these girls needed adults to protect them.

That is why how we respond to disclosures matters. It is not just about being kind. It can determine whether a child feels safe enough to tell someone what happened, whether she gets the medical and psychosocial support she needs and whether the person who abused her is ever held accountable.

We often say that Nigerian children are precious. We say that children are the future. We say that we would do anything to protect them.

But sometimes what a child needs from an adult is very simple: listen to her, believe her, protect her privacy and help her get out of the situation and not turn her pain into content to grow your TikTok account.