Police raids in Abuja lead to arbitrary arrests for prostitution and sexual abuse in custody

Abuja—On the evening of September 29, 2012, Dorothy Njemanze was waiting to meet her brother at the popular Dreams Garden restaurant in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, before heading to an event where she was billed to emcee. She parked her car by the roadside, and as she was walking toward the entrance, a man attacked her at gunpoint, grabbing her breasts and forcing her onto a waiting bus with Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) branding along its side. “I fought my way out and then the soldiers with him joined him,” she told Women Under Siege. “They said I was a notorious prostitute.”

Njemanze pleaded for them to let her present her identity cards, but they ignored her. By then, a small crowd had formed from which several people shouted to her assailants that she was a radio presenter (with Brekete FM) and Nollywood actress, not a prostitute. She was later freed after being driven a short distance away.

Her attackers were security operatives—soldiers and policemen attached to an AEPB monitoring team known as the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) joint task force, with representatives from the Social Development Secretariat and Development Control. Njemanze would be violently arrested twice more, again in 2012 and in 2014 respectively, by the AEPB under the same charge. Both times, she was taken to Utako Police Station, where she was released on bail. “I was sexually assaulted those three times,” she said.

Njemanze believes her arrests were meant to intimidate her for using her foundation, which utilizes the entertainment media to deconstruct trends of abuse and support survivors, some of whom have been assaulted by the very same task force.

Two years after Njemanze’s last assault, she and three other women brought charges against the FCTA in front of an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) court. In 2017, the court ruled (PDF) in their favor that their arrests were discriminatory, constituted gender-based violence, and were in violation of the victims’ human rights, awarding N6,000,000 (then approximately $38,000) to Njemanze and two other plaintiffs (one plaintiff’s case was thrown out due to lack of merit).

But Njemanze’s court victory was not enough to deter the FCTA from its course.

Women as targets for arbitrary arrests

Women continue to be routinely arrested by the task force, targeted—like Njemanze—for their clothing and either bailed or hastily charged with prostitution at the AEPB mobile court.

The task force’s charge is to rid the city of what Shaka Sunday, spokesperson for the Social Development Secretariat, calls “social nuisance.” His counterpart at the AEPB, Muktar Ibrahim, told us that this includes removal of “noise pollution, solid waste, street hawkers, beggars, and prostitutes.” The team was able to prey upon women under this charge largely without notice or reprimand until April and May of this year, when it raided several nightclubs in Abuja and arrested more than 100 women.

Ibrahim told us that the arrests were made because most of the spaces used as nightclubs were approved for unrelated activities but later converted into nightclubs. Contrastingly, his counterpart at the Abuja police command, Danjuma Tanimu, said the women were arrested for “hanging around nightclubs.”

More than a quarter of the women arrested were charged with prostitution, but convicted as “idle” persons, and sentenced to one month in prison with a N3,000 (or $9) fine option in accordance with a penal code regulating social conduct in the city. The code partly defines an idle person as “a common prostitute behaving in a disorderly or indecent manner in a public place or persistently importuning or soliciting persons for the purpose of prostitution.” While the code is unclear on who constitutes a “common prostitute,” most women are arrested on vague moral grounds like “indecent dressing.”

Civil society outrage over a climate of abuse

What’s more, many of the women said that upon their arrest and booking at Utako Police Station, they were raped by police officers in exchange for freedom. This damning revelation sparked outrage among activists, including Amnesty International Nigeria, who joined 35 other civil society groups in a statement of condemnation. In the following weeks, local feminist groups also –held protests, under the banner of #SayHerNameNigeria, across major cities in Nigeria, including Abuja, Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Benin City. Their collective pressure prompted authorities and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to suspend raids in order to investigate the allegations. However, not long after the agreement was made public, 11 more women were arrested and reported that they were beaten with batons during their arrest. The investigation, meanwhile, appears to be ongoing.

Feminist and civil society groups in Nigeria have also found support abroad. In May, protesters spilled into the streets of Accra, Ghana’s capital, carrying signs and shouting slogans as they marched to the office of the Nigerian High Commission to demand an immediate end to the assaults. “When women are oppressed in one place, that oppression is bound to happen in all other places,” said Fatima Derby of Through the Eyes of African Women, one of the Accra march’s organizers alongside The Young Feminist Collective, Drama Queens Ghana, and Moon Girls Live.

“By publicizing our struggles, we have been able to see how our issues, though rooted in different cultural, racial, religious or sexual identities, still mirror each other,” added Adaku Ufere, a Nigerian human rights lawyer in Ghana who also helped organized the march.

And in London, protesters crowded outside Nigeria’s embassy with signs reading “Sex for bail is rape”; “Police everywhere justice nowhere”; “Arrest not assault, protect not molest”; and “To be a woman is not a crime.”

Gender-based violence rooted in religion and culture

For many activists in Nigeria, the specific targeting of women—and not the “vagabonds” who patronize sex workers, as laid out in the –penal code—raises questions. “The premise is unequal,” said Lagos-based Angel Nduka-Nwosu, co-founder of As Equals Africa. “You are arresting a [female] sex worker, but you are not arresting the person patronizing her? Meaning you don’t have a problem with sex, you just have a problem with women.”’

In Nigeria, violence against women is accepted as commonplace, –but what exactly drives predominant acts of assault against women?

“It’s cultural; learned and passed on,” said Maryam Awaisu, an activist and writer based in the northern state of Kaduna. Awaisu was arrested last February by agents of the police’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in what Amnesty International said was an attempt to intimidate her for supporting the Nigerian version of the global #MeToo movement. “It’s so prevalent, so those who have skeletons in their cupboards jump to defend those who have been outed.”

Male dominance is also taught in religious and family settings here, and women are made to believe that any form of resistance contravenes such religious orders. “The very foundation of our society is built on the myth of imaginary male superiority, supported by the pillars of religion, tradition, and culture,” Ufere told us. “With religious books telling us [that] women shouldn’t be placed in authority over men and [the- false culture of female submission being propagated as ‘our tradition,’ the average man fully believes he is qualified to lead the average woman”.”

A report by the Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Program (NSRP), an initiative of UK government's Department for International Development (DFID), whose work is partly to reduce violence against women, says the biggest driver is the practice of silence among victims themselves, fueled by low levels of education and lack of awareness. But through advocacy and social media tools, silence is gradually losing its grip on young women in Nigeria. In February of this year, 24-year-old Khadijah Adamu, a pharmacist in the northern state of Kano, took to Twitter detailing how she suffered physical abuse and almost died at the hands of her boyfriend. The tweets attracted hundreds of responses from women, including from Awaisu and Fakhrriyyah Hashim, an Abuja-based development activist who first used a hashtag—#ArewaMeToo—to convey her empathy.

In the Hausa language, “Arewa” is used to describe northern Nigeria, a majority Muslim and conservative region. In what stands as the first time that women in Arewa would open up on their experiences of sexual and physical violence, many female Twitter users from the north started naming and shaming their abusers with Hashim’s #ArewaMeToo hashtag.

Hashim looks back now and feels the responses were soothing. “We often find wrongful usage of the religious context, of not exposing the sins of another to cover up incidents of sexual violence… We relate a women's dignity to the sexual violation of her body, and in order for society to not alienate her, we maintain that silence is the best tool to shielding her dignity," said Hashim. 

Njemanze, for her part, continues to advocate for women who, like her, were assaulted. In May, she organized a media briefing for six of the women swept up in the nightclub raids to share their stories of detention. “The Nigeria police thinks that I have an unfinished revenge mission against them and that … that I am trying to dent their image,” she said, but insists that her work, and the work of her foundation, is to give women like her the freedom “to live a normal life in my city and free from moral policing. Until that happens, we will keep shouting."