The Director General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Julie Okah-Donli, said that boys in Nigeria are currently more at risk of rape than girls.

She attributed this to the fact that many people tend to focus more on raping girls and forget that boys’ rape is actually on the rise in Nigeria.

She said this while flagging up the “Cover me” campaign, which aims to expose the perpetrators of child abuse, and on Saturday 27 June she spoke out in favour of tougher punishment for rapists and stronger mechanisms to prevent rapprochement.

“I do not advocate the death penalty because it makes rapists brutal, because they do not want to leave witnesses, and because it also promotes jungle justice, where people use it to falsely accuse and kill people.

Boys are more vulnerable to rape because we tend to focus more on girls, so we need to focus on all our children. Now, you see a lot of silly videos with people exchanging and rebooking. If you send me these videos, I will arrest you for child pornography, and anyone who stigmatizes the victims will be punished. We need to let people know that we’re serious.

Many things were revealed to us during the lockdown and we found that most of the reports we received came from attentive neighbors, not parents,” she said.