Boys, too, get raped.
People think only girls can be raped. However, this is not true. The young men could also be taken advantage of molested and raped. More so, by people of both genders. Little boys could be molested by more mature women. Young men are sometimes molested sexually by women, and just recently, Tunde Onakoye, a user of X, lamented: “One terrible thing we discovered last year during medical checkups for the street kids we took off
Lekki-epe expressway was they were being sexually molested and raped by the much older area boys. Horrible. Just horrible.”
Comments indicated that the incident would occur in a cycle of molestation, rape and trauma inducing trauma. In this light, this study intends to look into the concept of psychological trauma as it occurs in Idede Oseyande's Warri Nor Dey Carry Last where trauma is essentially portrayed in the lives of Okhiemute and his mother. However, the focus is on Okhiemute.
Trauma, as defined by the American Psychological Association, is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Sigmund Freud, in his exposition of trauma says, “we describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise effective barrier against stimuli.” In 1920, Freud borrowed the word “trauma”, which means piercing of the skin, from Greek. Psychology Matters (2015) says, “early relationship, conflicts and challenging events stored in our mind are fundamental to our ability to reflect and assimilate a current traumatic event so that we can continue to function.”
Looking at the story of Okhiemute in the novel in the light of this concept, we can see that the character experiences trauma, in the sense of sexual molestation, at an early age. This occurs when a bigger girl takes him to a room and steals his innocence. He narrates that at the age, he did not really understand what was going on. He even tried to reproduce what he had been taught with a girl his age until he was cautioned by one of the bigger girl’s friends. The molester would call her friends to join in the molestation and they would all take advantage of him. He grew up to discover that he had been molested and decided to pay back.
He had lost something dear to him – his innocence – and had been brought into sexual relations without his consent, therefore, the protective shield around his psyche was penetrated. It brought about a change in his ego and unconscious. His unonscious evolved to see women as predatory and evil, while his ego decided to work with this understanding. He resorted to taking advantage of women that grab his attention or show interest in him. He would loop them in and leave them without an explanation, therefore causing a severe heartbreak. The trauma was only dealt with when he opened up to his friends during their talk, and when he met the woman he later married.
With these, we can see that trauma can also affect the male gender and that our sons should be very well protected because they too could be victims of molestation, not just the female gender.
Comments