Abuse Of Househelps: An Ugly Spectacle That Persists

Rcently, the news media was awash with the child abuse case involving Anambra lawyer, Adachukwu Chikelue-Okafor, who was accused of repeated physical abuse of her 10-year-old house help. The little girl’s body was filled with burns and other scars arising from this mindless abuse that included inflicting injuries on her private part using a hot knife and burning her buttocks with an electric iron. Adachukwu, who was declared wanted by the Anambra state government, later surrendered to the authorities and was last week arraigned and remanded.

This incident, once again, brought to the fore the ugly spectacle of abuse of house helps by their guardians, an occurrence which instances have never ceased to surface. Culprits, most times, have been women who ought to act as mothers to the abused.

Oftentimes, parents who give out their children to live with another person do so because they require assistance in training such children; in other words, they expect the person taking custody of the child to play the loving role of a parent to them. Therefore, whenever such guardians turn around to become beasts towards such a child, it amounts a human tragedy.

Cases of child abuse by guardians appear to have been on the increase in the last couple of years. This is significant given that foster parenting has been our culture from the beginning as a result of our extended family system and general communal worldview. Many of our parents were fostered by other persons who are not their biological parents, and many attribute their success in life to the grooming and support they received from these foster parents. My own mother, at a point in her childhood, lived with and was raised by a family that was not biologically related to her.

So, what is fuelling the current incidence of hostility to foster children thereby threatening the integrity and sustainability of our age-honoured culture of foster parenting? What is different about today’s foster parents that abuse of children entrusted to them is becoming rife? One possibility is that such abuses have always existed, but that the advent of social media is making it possible for more and more incidents to be made public. This is definitely a factor but may not tell the entire story. There is also another possible explanation, which is that what is playing out is a consequence of the progressive weakening of our traditional communal structures and ethos wherein everyone was their brother’s keeper and every adult a parent to every child. Under the influence of this traditional way of life (now being eroded by our increasing adoption of western individualism), people had some sense of caring obligation towards the children of their neighbours, more so those of their relatives. When we were growing up, the culture of people leaving their children with their neighbours while going to work everyday was common. But doing same today may amount to leaving one’s kids with a “stranger”. Worse still, not even one’s relatives can be entirely trusted to take good care of children belonging to their siblings, cousins, uncles etc. Many cases of abuse of non-biological children have involved guardians having custody of their relatives’ children.

In the light of this cultural change, one wonders whether it’s still a wise option to give out one’s child to be fostered by another. Definitely, most people will choose to have all their children under their own roof, nurture and train them themselves. However, the reality is that the circumstances that compel people to give out their children may be quite beyond their control. Before now, the more common trend was for rural dwellers to give out their children to more economically capable individuals who live in urban areas in the belief that the new home will provide a better socio-economic environment for the development of the child. However, with the fast-spreading mass poverty in the land, even many urban dwellers may now be compelled to look for who will take and help train their children.

The foregoing underscores the human and moral tragedy of abuse of a foster child. It represents a downright betrayal of a parent who entrusts their child to another with the hope of a better life for the child and only to have the complete opposite. There have been many cases where parents who cannot afford the school fees of their children give them out to others who commit to help train them, only for the foster parents to exploit the children as domestic slaves so much so that the sheer amount of labour they’re saddled with begins to interfere with their education. Many will still recall the tragic case of the little Ikechukwu Okonkwo whose guardians took from his parents on the commitment that they would train him in school only to start sending him out to hawk groundnuts in the street, and in the process of which he fell into the hands of nefarious elements who beheaded him apparently to trade his body parts. This was the incident in the heart of the famous Otokoto saga of 1996 in Owerri, Imo state.

Besides being evidence of the collapse of our traditional communalism, abuse of non-biological children raises a fundamental question about our humanity. How on earth can a human being supposedly naturally infused with compassion insert a hot knife into the vagina of a child and use a hot electric iron on her buttocks? “Homo homini lupus” (man is wolf to man) – so said the Romans. But then that age-long saying has also been shown to represent grave defamation against wolf, an animal that’s hostile only to other animals but kind and very protective of its fellow wolves. Thus, wolf’s aggressive disposition cannot be used as an analogy to explain the wickedness of man who cannot distinguish between a fellow human and another animal species.

Worse still, it’s women who are often the culprits in these child abuse cases. This scandalously negates the imaginings of love, tenderness and compassion associated with motherhood from time immemorial. And the fact that these women end up being so loving and compassionate towards their own biological children points to the selfish motivations of these wicked acts. This once more highlights the need for taking the issue of mental health very seriously. Many people are working about with various degrees of mental cases, and unfortunately, they’re living with other persons as parents, guardians and spouses.

When one, in the heat of anger, spontaneously slaps or hits another with something, it may still be accommodated as a conduct that’s within the possibilities of human emotional imperfection. But when it involves premeditated acts of putting a knife in fire and allowing it to heat up and plugging an iron into a socket and letting it get hot for use on a human body, it strongly suggests something more than loss of emotional control. At worst, it smacks of sheer evil genius, and at best, insanity

It is common knowledge among lawyers that the defence of provocation does not avail one who had the luxury of time to prepare for an act of aggression that results to death. For defence of provocation to succeed, the defendant has to show that they acted in the “heat of passion” meaning that there was little or no time for their anger to subside before they reacted the way they did. In an interesting case decided by the Supreme Court in 2009, the defence of provocation as pleaded by a defendant who killed his friend in a community in Ebonyi state was dismissed. Delivering the unanimous judgement of the court, Justice Niki Tobi noted that the defendant had the time to ride on a bicycle to his home to get a knife which he hid under his clothes and then rode back to where his friend whom he had fought with earlier was and stabbed him to death. According to the court, the time taken by his journey to and from his home was enough for his anger to subside freeing him from the momentary madness that leads one into unreasonable reactions. Consequently, he could not be said to have acted in the heat of passion, his action was premeditated, and so he must die by hanging.

My point is that when humans, more so mothers, begin to show such outrageous degrees of cruelity towards children entrusted to their care, society ought to get worried. It’s not something to be treated as “one of those things”. It rather calls for a closer attention to sanity of individuals. This is very important given the serious institutional and cultural deficits we suffer as a nation in the area of mental health wellbeing.

Secondly, the government must rise to the challenge of enforcing the law very stringently in matters related to child abuse. The law is there to deter crime and when people freely commit crime in spite of the law, then there’s something not working about the law and/or its implementation.

We may also begin to think of regulating foster parenting the way adoption is regulated. In the face of the weakening of our traditional communalism, the stakes are now quite high whenever a child is given out to a non-biological parent to foster. The eyes of the state ought to be on such situations. The child’s welfare department of the relevant ministry of every state should be mandated by law to register cases of giving out of children to non-biological parents. The time of such giving out, the identity of the would-be foster parents, their address, occupation and other relevant information must be documented by the state. This will not only contribute in deterring abuse but will also help the state to monitor the welfare of such children. Again, before such foster parenting is approved, the concerned government department should be satisfied that the would-be foster parent is not exhibiting any form of insanity and has never been associated with child abuse in the past. To this effect, the department should maintain a register of persons found to have been involved in child abuse who therefore can never have a person’s child entrusted to their care again. Also, the would-be parent must make a commitment in writing (preferably under oath) that they will see to the total protection of the rights and welfare of the child in line with the standards prescribed by the law.

I’m aware that some people may see the above suggestions as killing an ant with a sledge hammer. But the reality is that times have changed. Our traditional institutions that ensured communal protection of the rights and welfare of the child are collapsing and it’s the time for the state to step in. This is the same thing happening with caring for the elderly where the weakening of our communal living has rendered many elderly people literarily abandoned, highlighting the need for embrace of one of the modern systems of social welfare – old people’s homes. Similarly, today modern institutions like creches and daycares have stepped in to take daily custody of children in the face of changing lifestyles that make it difficult to stick to the traditional system of communal custody. Before now, it would sound like an abomination for a parent to leave the daily care of their infant in the hands of schools.

While we think about the above radical reforms, in the interim, the existing laws should be enforced. In addition, public awareness campaign should be intensified on the legal implications of abuse of children, especially in the light of the Child’s Rights Act and Violence Against Persons Act which have been domesticated by most states of the federation. People need to know that the way they treat children under their roof is not completely their private affair, it’s a matter which the state and the law have a significant interest in, and will punish any wrongdoing related thereto.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.