Child Abuse And The Limitation Of The Law In Addressing The Situation -By Adepoju Isaiah Gbenga

Law can simply be defined as the norms that guide the welfare of the society.

Child abuse is an act of harassment either emotionally, sexually and other ways which counteract the wellbeing of the child. It has been one recurring crime over the last few decades, though the law has been able to break the camel’s back once but it has been too sluggish as to curb it now. Child abuse is constant in our societies nowadays and the law seems to pay no or less attention to it. It is found in our streets. Children can no longer walk the street without the fear of their skirts forcefully lifted up or in any other way inappropriate for a ‘person’ (context of legal definition).

There has been one indivisible connection between child abuse and legal studies which I will discuss here whilst antagonizing the prospect of the Law as supreme and its limitation in addressing the child abuse phenomenal.

To address this issue we have to consider the structure of the country (government) which has made the law in fighting child abuse, and to also consider the adherence of the citizens to the provision of the law. In areas like Lagos and Ibadan the provision of the law against child abuse may walk on slippery path. This principle is tied from one to the other.

Pre-colonial Africa – Post Colonial setting – Degradation of the family system – Children raised in the streets – Ineffectiveness of the Nigerian legal system.

According to this chain rule, the role; law will play in curbing child abuse and its effect in the society will be tasking and next to impossible in a governmental setting where an average Nigerian parent live on /less (than) $2 per day, whereby children are forced to face the rigors of the street. I believe the law is overwhelmed and meanwhile we shouldn’t forget that the law isn’t a perfect ordinance passed down from Supreme Beings (as in a theocratic system) but the concatenation of possible solutions from individuals (rather than person – according to the legal personality of the lawmakers) and this ‘individuals’ are people who have either grown up with silver spoons (have not experienced a personal relationship with people at the grassroots) or they could be poor men also ( have been affected by the previous government). The chain goes on like that.

Children (victims of social injustice as represented by Amma Darko’s ‘Faceless’) would rather go into the arms of harassment than to be whipped with hunger and in most cases death. For the law to be effective in curbing child abuse, the law and the lawmakers should not beforehand abuse the wellbeing of the children in terms of monetary allocation.

“one of the reasons often suggested for the high rate of the country’s involvement in this inglorious enterprise [Child abuse and slave trade] is the perennially embattled socio-economic process, whose devastation has been serially orchestrated by the Nigeria’s history of uninspiring leadership” (Ezechi Onyerionwu, ANA Review (2019); P. 158)