Fairness, accountability, rights, punishment, and the moral logic of systems.
In Nigeria, two women were summoned by the police for doing something ordinary — leaving a review. One reviewed a bread. Another questioned a nursery school textbook bought for her five-year-old. Both found themselves facing the full weight of law enforcement, not because they broke the law, but because they spoke. This essay asks a simple question: when did having an opinion become a crime?
In a world where stories of sexual violence or assault are common, a regular occurrence even, the greatest danger is not even the assault itself, it's the growing numbness that allows it to thrive and continue. We hear these stories so often that it becomes normalized, dare I call it an expectation. Calling it an expectation feels evil and exaggerated but it's the reality we don't want to confront. Desensitization may feel like protection, but quietly and eventually, empathy things down, victims become even more silent, healing becomes a farce, almost impossible a feat. Pain normalized makes victims question their own realty, witnesses who begin to care less. Healing CANNOT exist without feeling, confrontation and loudness. The same way justice cannot survive without compassion. To confront sexual assault effectively, society must resist the urge to become indifferent and nonchalant about these things. We must choose to listen, validate, actually care and choose to fight. What we stop feeling, we stop fighting and that in itself is a cost too great to hear. Call it a sin even.
