Nigeria: A Festival or a Culture of Rape?

Until something changes, the next Ozoro is already forming, and the conditions that enable men to harm without consequence remain firmly in place.

The Nigerian society has failed both the male and female child. Women and girls in Ozoro, Delta State, were recently groped, surrounded, and violated in broad daylight by crowds of laughing men. More than 500 women's groups have demanded arrests; the Nigerian Bar Association has issued statements; yet the response to this is still being debated and diluted.

The mass assault was coordinated enough to feel permitted, and that raises the harder question: How many incidents of violent assault against women do we have to experience before we see it as a failure that Nigeria has refused to confront? A societal, cultural, and institutional failure. What kind of society produces men who view women in public spaces as being available for violation, and what kind of system allows them to act on that belief without fear of consequence?

The majority of Nigerian men are shaped in environments where misconduct is normalised, excused and, at times, rewarded. Boys grow up watching older men behave without consequence. They see silence, approval, laughter, and, over time, interpret that absence of consequence as permission. They observe, then they participate. That is how a crowd forms, and that is how a festival becomes a site of assault.

The girl child in Nigeria is conditioned early on how to avoid harm, told what to wear, where to go, and how to behave, through repeated instructions such as "Why did you enter that house?" "Why are you dressed like that?" "Cover yourself." "Why were you laughing with him?" These shape her behaviour, movement, speech, and posture from an early age. The boy child, however, is not subjected to the same discipline. He is not told that his behaviour can be a threat or that his language carries consequences. He is not corrected early enough when he crosses lines, that is, if it happens at all. The issue is not that girls are warned, but that there is an absence of equal responsibility for boys. That imbalance grows quietly until it becomes visible in public, in crowds.

It shows up in the policeman who rapes a teenager inside a station meant to protect her; in men jailed for assaulting their own daughters; in the trader in Idumota, Lagos, who gropes you in a crowded market because he knows nothing will happen; in the man on the bus who exposes his penis without fear; in the street boys who shout "ashawo" when you reject them; in the teenagers who laugh and comment on your body as you walk past because they expect silence; and in the old man who corners a girl and squeezes her breasts, as if her body is public property.

The culture continues in language. On Nigerian social media, women are reduced to parts and slurs with casual ease. Words and phrases like "fishy obough," "toto wey don gbim," "ashawo," are repeated so freely that they begin to feel normal. They are framed as humour, yet language shapes behaviour, and over time, it becomes instruction, teaching boys that women can be described, reduced, and consumed before anything else happens. When that language goes unchallenged, entitlement becomes permitted.

Again, what happened in Ozoro is a culture built over years of unchecked language, tolerated behaviour, and selective outrage, where institutional response deepens the problem. We can see that clearly in the response when women decide to speak about violence, the conversation shifts almost immediately to centre the discomfort of men. "Not all men," where the "good men" redirect the conversation away from what was done to women and toward how women describe it, allowing men who are not perpetrators to present themselves as unfairly targeted.

The discussion moves from violence to vocabulary, tone, language, "feminist rhetoric," and a debate about how women choose to speak. "Why don't you go practice your feminism elsewhere?" as though local violence must compete with global extremes to be taken seriously. Other men will move away from the conversation entirely, as if silence reduces the weight of the issue. The response to Ozoro did follow this exact pattern, and even institutions meant to uphold accountability were not exempt. I asked a question about sexual violence in Ozoro, and a police spokesperson responded with a sexual remark, choosing, in the middle of a discussion about violence, to sexualise the woman who was raising the concern.

Some men immediately moved to defend it, pulling out the dictionary meanings of "turn on," as though the issue was semantics. The effort was to dilute the misconduct and make the woman the problem for "making a fuss."

This is how normalisation works. What women are discouraged from challenging becomes absorbed into culture, if we have a public willing to rationalise it. This is how cultures of violence sustain themselves, shaping how cases are handled and whether perpetrators are held accountable. When misconduct is softened in speech, it is seldom addressed in practice.

Nigeria already contends with sexual violence on a significant scale, with cases of rape emerging regularly across states, often followed by delayed investigations, weak prosecutions, or quiet settlements. One in every three Nigerian women has experienced sexual or physical violence by the age of 15, and these statistics are even outdated. Child marriage continues in parts of the country, while young girls grow up in systems that fail to protect them, often ending up sex-trafficked across borders. It is also a country where women are beaten, subjected to control, and, in too many cases, killed by men who believe they are entitled to power over women. The tendency to scrutinise the victim before confronting the perpetrator is part of the same culture that allows abuse to continue.

Ozoro demands attention because it is familiar to Nigerian women, and Nigerian systems must respond to it. No tradition justifies assault, and the fact that this must still be stated points to a deeper issue sustained by the lack of consequences. The question is no longer whether Nigeria has a rape culture: that is already established. The question is whether anything interrupts it, and that interruption must begin socially.

Stop the joke when it crosses the line. Stop your friend when he crosses the line. Stop the language when it reduces women. Refuse to laugh, refuse to normalise, refuse to participate. Call out harmful behaviour immediately. Protest when men feel entitled to women's bodies. Teach boys that boundaries are not negotiable, because culture only changes when tolerance ends.

To be honest, women cannot dismantle this alone. We can name, resist, and sometimes survive it, but the system that sustains this culture depends on those who benefit from it to intervene. It requires MEN. The good men must move beyond rhetoric, because saying "not all men" is not intervention and does not interrupt harm. What matters is action, in public and in private, in real time and in everyday moments where harm is allowed to pass unchecked. This work should not wait until it becomes personal; it should begin now, with the willingness to make discomfort visible.

It did not have to take the many women lost this year to force recognition. It did not have to take a festival turning into a site of mass sexual assault. It does not have to take another girl being cornered, silenced, or dismissed. Nigeria does not lack laws; it lacks consistency in enforcement, alignment between awareness and action, and a refusal to tolerate violence against the girl child. Are Nigerians, as a society, willing to confront what made the violence in Ozoro possible, and is there a readiness to dismantle it before we are named "the rape capital of the world?"

Because until something changes, the next Ozoro is already forming, and the conditions that enable men to harm without consequence remain firmly in place.