You might have been aware of the news going around about a 10-year old girl allegedly raped by a 13-year old boy during Chrisland Schools, VGC, Lagos Dubai trip.
From the information I gathered so far, the girl, along with certain of her schoolmates travelled in the company of some teachers to Dubai to participate in a games event.
One of the evenings, the children were left on their own and they decided to have fun, playing the TRUTH OR DARE game among themselves. The game implies that someone will stand up and challenge another to reveal the TRUTH about something immoral he or she had done in secret before. On the other hand, a boy can DARE a girl to do something immoral like remove all her dressing before everyone or pay a fine.
In this case, a boy of 13 DARED a girl of 10 to remove her undies and engage in an immoral act with him and the girl accepted the challenge. The two committed the act before others who recorded it and posted it on Instagram.
Until they got back to Nigeria, only the students knew what happened and they kept it to themselves. When the girl started showing signs of pregnancy a month after, the school got to know about the incident. After interrogating the children involved, they took the girl for a pregnancy test and reported to the parents that the girl undertook a COVID-19 test. They invited the mother of the girl and advised the parents to withdraw the girl’s telephone. When the school noticed that the news was all over the internet, they expelled the boy involved and suspended the girl for gross misbehaviour, still not disclosing the issue to the parents. The whole incident went public yesterday and Lagos state quickly shut down all Chrisland Schools to pave way for further investigations.
If you followed this event closely, you will agree that a lot of questions are begging for answers.
1. What is a 10-year old doing with a telephone that she was even talking to the school?
2. What kind of game event is a preteen supposed to travel as far as Dubai to attend?
3. Where were the teachers that accompanied these children when all this happened?
4. Why did the school cover this up for more than a month, investigating and conducting pregnancy tests for the girl without the parents’ knowledge?
5. What are the regulatory processes in place by the State to prevent this kind of incident in schools, rather than fighting the consequences?
Anybody who watched the video will know that the boy and the girl involved did not start having sex at the Dubai event. You will agree that it was a willing act on the part of the girl and not a case of rape as being alleged. Why? She had the option of not playing the game at all.
This brings us to the obvious conclusion that the effect of the telephone, TV and the influence of bad friends on our children today is highly unimaginable. Unfortunately, many parents lack the ability to control the excesses of their children back home and we have teachers who look away when children engage in nefarious acts of this sort because they don’t want any problems from the school management who are afraid to lose the children.
The level of moral decadence in our society today is deep and as parents and teachers, we have to work together to help our children combat the menace.
Children will continue to be who they are: children..Children will always like to have fun and try new things. Children will always hate parents and teachers who try to regulate what they can do while among themselves. It behoves us as teachers and parents to put our feet on the ground and insist that they do only what is right and moral.
It starts with vulgar language and immoral songs. Then it graduates to watching pornographic videos on their phones and over the TV. Finally, they try to practice what they have seen at any unsupervised association they have among themselves in schools, churches, birthday events or during games events like the case in reference.
We need to realize that our schools in Nigeria are not duly regulated by the government. The activities of spoilt children from very wealthy parents who cannot say NO to the demands of their children continue to take tolls on innocent children from good homes. We saw Dowen yesterday. We can see Chrisland today. If the next will not involve your school and your children, parents and teachers must use their PTA platforms to address grave issues that could affect their children’s future.
We need to wake up, nip issues in the bud and agree to reprimand these children sternly when they do wrong if our labour over them as teachers and parents will not be in vain.
