Quick hypothetical question! You’re taking an evening stroll through your neighbourhood when you suddenly hear screaming, you look across the road and see a man assaulting another, even bigger man. The bigger man tries to defend himself by blocking the hits, but he doesn’t hit back.

What do you make of this situation? Think of your answer, got it? Good. Now let me add that the two men are actually father and child, so you’re actually watching a father assault his teenage son. Does this extra information change your answer? Does it make you want to substitute the word “assault” for “discipline” or “training”? Even without knowing what happened, are you already thinking of ways to justify such violence? Does it make our hypothetical scenario suddenly okay to you? If it does, then welcome to SoToday, this post is for you.

SoToday we’ll be talking about rights of children in Nigeria, what rights does a child have? Do they have any rights at all? This is because, as our hypothetical scenario might’ve proved to you, people in our society seem to think of children, not as people, not as small humans, but as properties of their parents. The consequence is that a parent can quite literally do anything to their child and the majority of us will simply look away. This is very similar to how farmers can do anything to their livestock and no one will bat an eye. Yes, I’m comparing children to livestock, but that’s not even the sad part; the sad part, is that my comparison is spot on. The only line we draw when it comes to parenting in Nigeria, is that you can not sexually assault your child and you cannot kill your child, anything else is fair game to the vast majority of us.

Remember the Nollywood movies of old? Where a village girl would move to the city to be a ‘house girl’ and she’d be maltreated and the movie would have us all hating her hosts and rightfully tagging them wicked? Ask yourself this one question, would you still think her employers were evil, heartless people if they were in fact her parents? If after the periodic spats of extreme punishment and wickedness they told her they loved her and only want what’s best for her as they drive to the hospital to treat her injuries? Would you? This is the reality of a lot of people, perhaps even yours. This may be commonplace, but it is far from okay and it should not be acceptable.

Bad decisions often come from good intentions, so I don’t doubt for a second that parents like the one in our example really do love and want the best for their kids. They want their kids to be “somebody” in the future and so they utilise unsavoury methods in their quest to achieve this goal. Very often there are debates on social media on the effectiveness and ethics of physical discipline; many people who had abusive childhoods speak up against it and vow to treat their kids differently, while many others with the same experiences swear that they turned out just fine and will raise their kids the exact same way their parents raised them. This post isn’t about that argument, but it is related to it, because in these debates many people on both sides, for different reasons, sometimes tell stories about how their parents treated them, abused them, and hurt them. I find it fascinating how these two very different viewpoints can emanate from the same source, so much so that I wrote about the general phenomenon, I named it The Duality effect.

Please remember that children are indeed people, capable of feeling just as you do, and like you, they simply wish to exist happily. It is not lost on me that children often have a limited understanding of things and need to be taught right from wrong, but I do hope that it has dawned on you that they’re capable of understanding things just like you are without the abuse, and if you’re a parent that abuses their children, remember that children are also very much capable of hate. Try not to mistake fear for respect.

“We will no longer accept the things we cannot change, we will instead change the things we cannot accept”. These are words to live by.