18 December 20
Right Now We Don’t Have a Prayer of Finishing
Based on where we are at this point in the month and the pace at which the donations are coming in, we have no chance of meeting our budget for December.
It is absolutely critical that we find a way to get the flow of contributions moving.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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17 December 20
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Dhruv Khullar | Getting Vaccinated Will (and Won't) Change My Behavior
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "Beyond the dread that I feel for my patients, my work as a physician on the coronavirus wards has instilled in me two related fears."
The shot will make me less worried about getting the virus—but I’ll still fear passing it on to others.
The first fear, which surges each time I learn about another of the nearly two thousand health-care workers who have died of COVID-19, is that I will get infected and fall seriously ill. A second, deeper and more persistent, fear is that I will pass the virus to my family. It’s because of this concern that I still isolate from them while caring for coronavirus patients.
Like other doctors in my hospital, I’ll be getting vaccinated sometime in the next week or two. I’ve spent some time thinking about how this will change my behavior and state of mind. Getting the shot will put the first fear to rest: we know for sure that the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna prevent severe illness in almost all people who are inoculated. But it won’t eliminate the second fear, because we’re not yet certain that the vaccines can prevent people from becoming infected or infecting others. It’s a distinction with a difference.
Consider the H.P.V. vaccine. It’s extraordinarily effective at reducing genital warts and cervical cancer in women who get inoculated; it has also, happily, driven down the incidence of H.P.V. among unvaccinated men, because, in addition to preventing illness, it stops vaccinated people from contracting, then transmitting the virus to others. Many vaccines, including those for measles and chicken pox, work this way. But others, such as the new shot against meningitis, don’t. That shot reduces the chances that vaccinated people will get sick, but it doesn’t do much to stop the spread of Neisseria meningitidis, the bacteria that causes meningitis, from one person to the next.
At the moment, we don’t know how the new coronavirus vaccines will affect transmission. While conducting their clinical trials, Pfizer and Moderna tracked how many vaccinated people got sick with COVID-19; they didn’t study whether the virus infected them. It’s possible that inoculated people in the trial caught the coronavirus, but that the vaccine prevented them from developing symptoms. If that happened, it would hardly lessen the astonishing nature of these vaccines, which have been developed in record time and prevent illness with an efficacy that was unthinkable just a few months ago. But it would mean that vaccinated individuals, without getting sick themselves, could give the virus to unvaccinated people—that is, to the majority of Americans, for months to come.
Both Pfizer and Moderna are studying the question. They plan to test the blood of trial participants for antibodies against a coronavirus protein called nucleocapsid, or N; because people only develop antibodies to this protein after they’ve been infected naturally, scientists should be able to establish for certain whether participants caught the virus after immunization. Right now, all we have are clues. According to documents submitted to the F.D.A., Moderna tested volunteers for the virus before the second dose, and found fewer asymptomatic cases among those who’d received it compared with those who hadn’t—an encouraging, but by no means conclusive, sign of interrupted viral transmission. And in November, Oxford issued a hopeful press release indicating that preliminary analyses had found a reduction in asymptomatic infections among its trial participants; this suggests that the vaccine it’s developing with AstraZeneca may reduce or prevent transmission, too. Again, though, final results have not been released or peer-reviewed.
In the worst-case scenario, in which the vaccines don’t halt infection directly, they could still make it less likely: by lessening the virus-spraying symptoms of infection—coughing and sneezing—they will insure that fewer respiratory droplets fly out of the noses and mouths of infected people. On the other hand, the risk of spread might grow if, after they are vaccinated, people mistakenly act as though they are no longer capable of hosting contagion. Since the beginning of the pandemic, planners have talked about using “immunity passports”—certifications of vaccination or prior infection—to allow immune individuals to work and travel as they wish. But, until we know for sure that vaccinated people cannot contract and spread the virus, such schemes are premature: a gathering of inoculated people could very well be a superspreader event, endangering the many unvaccinated people to whom they’re connected.
The answers will come. Early in the pandemic, we knew that wearing a mask made you less likely to spread the virus; it took time to confirm that masks protect wearers, too. With vaccines, the order is reversed: we know that an immunized person is protected, and hope to find that vaccination will also protect other, unvaccinated people. Until that’s confirmed, getting vaccinated should change very little about one’s behavior. While waiting for new data to come in, or for those around me to get vaccinated, I’ll continue wearing full protective gear when caring for patients. And I’ll keep avoiding close contact with friends and loved ones who aren’t vaccinated. I’ll become less worried for myself, but stay worried for everyone else.
In a way, it’s a painful decision. Like all of us, I desperately want life to return to normal. But, this week, the pandemic death toll in the United States passed three hundred thousand; if the current rate of death continues, it could pass four hundred thousand by the end of January. The vaccines are miraculous, and I’m grateful for them. But, for now, we need to keep protecting one another by using the social tools—masks, distance, and, sometimes, isolation—that we know for certain can work.
Police are seen during an active shooter situation, where Philadelphia police officers were shot during a drug raid on a home, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., August 14, 2019. (photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/Reuters)
Philadelphia Police Shot a Man and Accused Him of Rape. After 19 Years in Prison, He's Been Found Innocent.
Katie Shepherd, The Washington Post
Shepherd writes: "For 19 years, Termaine Joseph Hicks maintained his innocence."
In 2001, a police officer shot the 26-year-old Popeyes manager, later telling a court that Hicks reached for a gun after the officer found him raping a woman in a Philadelphia alleyway. A jury later convicted Hicks of rape, and a judge sentenced him to up to 25 years in prison.
But Hicks has always told a different story: He ran into the alley to help the woman when he heard her scream. As he was reaching for his cellphone to dial 911, the police suddenly arrived, shot him in the back and charged him unjustly.
Now, under the scrutiny of a new investigation, the case against Hicks has fallen apart.
The 45-year-old was exonerated on Wednesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer first reported, after a new analysis suggested the conviction was based on false testimony and questionable evidence — possibly in an attempt to justify a botched police shooting.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit sided with Hicks and his lawyers, and Common Pleas Court Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman vacated his conviction on Wednesday.
“I am quite cognizant of the pain and the trauma of the victim, and then more pain in realizing that the wrong person was convicted,” Brandeis-Roman said Wednesday, the Inquirer reported. “I do feel that, one case at a time, this system is being improved.”
The reversal comes amid a recent flurry of exonerations as the city’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, has aggressively pushed to revisit at least 16 questionable convictions.
Hicks’s case began in the early-morning hours of Nov. 27, 2001, according to a memorandum summarizing the case, as a woman walked to an early shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. Someone grabbed her, dragged her into an alley and raped her at gunpoint. She couldn’t clearly see her attacker in the dark, and she suffered a head injury.
Philadelphia police officer Marvin Vinson arrived on the scene with his partner, Sgt. Dennis Zungolo. Vinson told the court he saw Hicks attacking the woman and saw him reach for a gun. Then, he said he shot Hicks in the chest or stomach.
A jury believed the police’s version of events over Hicks’s story. He was convicted and served 19 years in State Correctional Institution Phoenix, about an hour northwest of Philadelphia.
But in recent years, evidence has piled up to suggest that the case presented by police and prosecutors was riddled with errors, the Inquirer reported.
Although most of the evidence analyzed in the recent review of the case was available at the time of Hicks’s original trial, the jury never saw an enhanced security tape that corroborated parts of Hicks’s story. The tape showed a man in a gray hoodie dragging the victim into the alley. Witnesses also testified that they had seen a man in a gray hoodie attack the woman, according to court records. But there was no gray hoodie among Hicks’s clothes that were turned over to police after he was treated for gunshot wounds in the hospital.
Medical records and damage to the clothes Hicks was wearing that night showed he had actually been shot in the back, contrary to what police claimed, the Inquirer reported. The gun police said they found on Hicks was registered to another Philadelphia police officer, who had not reported it stolen or missing, according to court records. The Inquirer reported that Hicks’s lawyer, Vanessa Potkin, said the gun was covered with blood, but the coat pocket, where Vinson claimed Hicks had been keeping the gun, was clean.
Hicks tried to appeal his conviction, court records show, claiming that his former defense attorney had erred by not insisting that police show the enhanced surveillance footage. That video also showed a delivery truck pull into a nearby loading dock, flashing its lights across the alley.
The victim had told police the attack stopped when bright lights shined on her assailant, spooking him. She assumed the lights were police flashlights, but the enhanced footage suggested the light had instead been the delivery truck’s headlights. Hicks said he showed up at the scene moments after the true assailant ran away from those headlights and just a few moments before police arrived.
Judges denied Hicks’s requests for a new trial until this year. But the prosecutors who reworked the case now say at least some of the testimony against Hicks was not true.
“False testimony was used,” said Patricia Cummings, chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit, the Inquirer reported. “And I believe it’s impossible to say that did not contribute to the conviction.”
Cummings said Philadelphia prosecutors would not attempt to retry the tainted case.
The Philadelphia police did not immediately return a request for comment on the case, but Anthony Erace, the executive director of the Police Advisory Commission, told the Inquirer he would seek a review of the investigation. Vinson and Zungolo still work for the Philadelphia police, the Inquirer reported.
Hicks was released from a state prison outside Philadelphia on Wednesday.
“I feel 100 pounds lighter,” he told the Inquirer. “It’s unfortunate and sad that it took how long it took for me to clear my name.”
His attorneys celebrated the exoneration Wednesday, noting that Hicks, who was the father of a 5-year-old boy when he was incarcerated, would be able to meet his 2-year-old grandson for the first time.
“He is going to be returned to something that he should have had on November 27, when police encountered him, but he didn’t,” Potkin said, the Inquirer reported. “The presumption of innocence.”
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. (photo: AP)
Grand Jury Indicts Six Men for Michigan Governor Kidnap Plot
Jonathan Allen, Reuters
Allen writes: "Six men facing charges of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer were indicted by a grand jury this week, the U.S. attorney's office for western Michigan said on Thursday."
The men — Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta — were arrested and charged in October with conspiring to grab Whitmer, a Democrat, from her vacation home earlier this year.
Some of the men belong to an anti-government militia group called Wolverine Watchmen. At least one of the defendants, Fox, considered Whitmer to be a sort of tyrant because she had ordered gyms closed in the state to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to prosecutors.
Obtaining the grand jury indictments, which came down on Wednesday, was a necessary step to proceed with the federal prosecutions, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement.
Parker Douglas, a lawyer representing Harris, said Harris had pleaded not guilty because “there was no actual conspiracy to kidnap Governor Whitmer.”
“As you can see from the indictment, the government is extremely vague regarding the alleged conspiracy’s nature, the alleged conspiracy’s object and any steps my client allegedly took to agree with the conspiracy,” Douglas wrote in an email.
Lawyers for the other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If convicted at trial, the defendants, who are in jail after being denied bail, would face a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The indictment accuses the men of discussing kidnapping Whitner, meeting in July in Wisconsin to practice using assault rifles, and surveilling Whitmer’s vacation home in August and September, mapping out how far it was from the nearest police station.
Some of the men also bought supplies for kidnapping, the indictment said. In September, Fox bought a Taser-style stun gun and placed a $4,000 order for explosives with someone he did not realize was, in fact, an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Winslow was re-sentenced to time served after IPNO director and lead attorney Jee Park successfully appealed based on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. (photo: GoFundMe
Fate Winslow, Sentenced to Life in Prison for Selling $20 Worth of Pot, Is Released After Serving 12 Years
Abby Haglage, Yahoo! News
Haglage writes: "Twelve years after being sentenced to life for selling $20 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop, Fate Vincent Winslow will walk out of Louisiana State Penitentiary on Wednesday a free man."
“Today is a day of redemption,” the 53-year-old wrote to Yahoo News following his resentencing hearing on Tuesday. “I get my freedom back, I get my life back. There are no words that can really explain my feelings right now.”
Winslow’s release comes through the work of the Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) and specifically Jee Park, its executive director, who felt confident that there was a path to freedom for Winslow as soon as she found his case. “You read the transcript of his trial and you’re just horrified about what happened,” Park told Yahoo News. “[His attorney] doesn’t object when he gets sentenced to life. He doesn’t file a motion to reconsider … he doesn’t do anything. He just says, ‘Sorry, you got a guilty verdict, you’re going to prison for the rest of your life.’”
On behalf of Winslow, IPNO filed an application for post-conviction relief to Caddo Parish District Attorney James Stewart in June 2019, arguing that Winslow was not given the right to a fair trial. His defense attorney, Alex Rubenstein (whom I interviewed for a 2015 Daily Beast story on Winslow — which, coincidentally, led Park to his case), hardly mentioned Winslow by name in the trial. He gave an opening statement 30 seconds long, called no witnesses and presented no evidence.
Park said that had Rubenstein emphasized that Winslow was homeless at the time of arrest, or that he was merely acting as a “runner” for a white dealer who — despite pocketing the majority of money — was never arrested, the jury might have ruled differently. Had Rubenstein, then a public defender, flagged to the judge that Winslow’s three prior convictions were all for nonviolent offenses, the judge might have decided that a life sentence was excessive.
“He gave no individualized factors about Fate that would give the judge reason to depart from the mandatory minimum sentence,” Park said, referring to Louisiana’s notoriously harsh habitual offender law. “Judges can do that under the right circumstances, but the lawyer has to do the work — present the evidence. He did none of that.”
When I spoke to Rubenstein for the 2015 story in the Daily Beast, I was surprised by his remarks about the case. “He was distributing marijuana. I can’t really be sympathetic,” Rubenstein told me, suggesting that Winslow was unworthy of a defense. In documents from the American Civil Liberties Union, the organization that first highlighted the case in a 2013 report, Winslow described standing up in court and imploring the judge for a new attorney, saying Rubenstein was doing “nothing” to help him. The judge denied his request.
Rubenstein, who could not be reached by Yahoo News for comment on the resentencing, didn’t remember Winslow asking for a new attorney, and disagreed that his defense was lacking. Instead, he claimed the problem was Winslow himself, a Black man from an underprivileged neighborhood who, like many of the other people Rubenstein represented, was difficult to defend. “You have to be realistic about it, we don’t have the best clientele in the world,” Rubenstein said in 2015. “I’m not saying they’re all losers — we win some cases, we try our best — but sometimes there just isn’t anything there.”
Park begs to differ. She describes the circumstances surrounding Winslow’s case as harrowing. Raised in poverty, in and out of homelessness and struggling with addiction, Winslow had long been disqualified by his prior felonies — two simple burglaries and one possession of cocaine — from applying for public assistance of any kind, including food stamps. The $5 that police found in his pocket from the $20 sale of weed, he told them, was money he planned to use for food.
On top of these factors, views on marijuana were already changing at the time of his arrest. By 2008, the drug that sent him to prison for life had already been decriminalized or legalized for medical use in 15 states. Four years into his sentence, Colorado and Washington passed laws allowing the recreational use of the drug. Now, in 2020, marijuana is medically legal in 35 states and recreationally in 15.
In the years since his trial, Winslow has become a symbol for what activists see as a broken criminal justice system. His name has been invoked on social media not only during mentions of the booming cannabis industry — which is projected to reach $35 billion in sales by 2025 — but when white men and women are sentenced to a fraction of the time for much more serious crimes. His case has been highlighted in recent years by the New York Times, the Yale Law Journal Forum and progressive lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, commits bank and tax fraud and gets 47 months. A homeless man, Fate Winslow, helped sell $20 of pot and got life in prison,” the Massachusetts Democrat tweeted in March 2019. “The words above the Supreme Court say ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ — when will we start acting like it?”
Winslow, writing to Yahoo News from his final day in what’s generally recognized as one of the most notorious prisons in the U.S. — the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as “Angola” for the plantation on which it was built — says he always believed his sentence was unduly severe. “Yes, I did serve 12 years of my life for marijuana, a drug that is now legal for recreational and medicinal use,” he wrote to Yahoo News. “I never did feel like I deserved all that time for something like that.”
Park agrees. “It’s completely insane that he [was] in there for a life sentence. Fine, he has a prior criminal record, but it's all nonviolent,” she said. “The facts of this particular case are crazy. Even if you gave the benefit of the doubt to the officer that it happened exactly as he tells it, it’s still so sympathetic. And Fate himself is such a humble, gentle person. You meet him and you think, how can this human being die in prison?”
Winslow said he’s thanking God for his newfound freedom, and looking forward to reuniting with his daughter Faith, who has set up a GoFundMe to help get him back on his feet. In a statement provided to IPNO, Faith expressed optimism about the future. “My dad and I got closer while he was imprisoned. Even though he was locked up, he was there for me when I needed him,” she said. “He deserves a second chance and I am so glad he is getting one.”
He seems equally excited about the impending reunion. “Upon my release, I just want to go get my kids and grandkids and try to make some memories with the time that I have left on this earth with them,” Winslow wrote to Yahoo News. “Twelve years are gone that I can never get back, but today redemption has come.”
Protesters gather at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue after a judge announced the charges brought by a grand jury against Detective Brett Hankison, one of three police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, in New York City, Sept. 23, 2020. (photo: Corey Sipkin/Getty)
A New Bill Aims to End Police Raids Like the One That Killed Breonna Taylor
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Speri writes: "The police killing of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot in Kentucky in March when plainclothes officers barged into her apartment in the middle of the night, has set off a series of state and local efforts to ban 'no-knock' raids - the police practice of breaking into someone's home unannounced to execute a search warrant."
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Young girls walk past a boarding school in Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, where hundreds of students who were abused were rescued last year. (photo: AFP)
Nigeria: Community Champions Enacted State Law to Castrate Male and Female Pedophiles
Nosmot Gbadamosi, Al Jazeera
Gbadamosi writes: "Adara knew a spiral of stigma and gossip would accompany her speaking out about such issues in the conservative community. Nevertheless, she decided to report the rape. But her battle had only just begun."
Despite criticism from rights groups, families of young rape victims in Kaduna state say they support the new law.
ne Friday in September Adara* finally went to the police station in Kaduna State, northern Nigeria, to report the rape of her 12-year-old son.
The boy had been suffering from repeated night terrors, she told officers. Upon examining him some months back, it had taken her a moment to digest what she had seen. He had a festering wound and his underwear was stained with semen, she told Al Jazeera.
Her son told her that a tailor in the neighbourhood and his friends had been abusing him in their shop since a partial coronavirus lockdown began in March. She knew the abusers. They were men in their early 20s who lived in the same community. The 12-year-old said he had been scared to tell anybody. The men gave him sweets and money and warned that if he said anything, they would kill his entire family, he said.
Adara knew a spiral of stigma and gossip would accompany her speaking out about such issues in the conservative community. Nevertheless, she decided to report the rape. But her battle had only just begun.
Hours after she left the police station, her neighbours had already heard about her visit through the community grapevine. By the time officers arrived with an arrest warrant, the five suspects had fled and gone into hiding.
A spokesperson for the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) at Kaduna State Command, which looks into child abuse cases, said the investigation was ongoing, with a manhunt on to find and arrest the alleged suspects.
Adara said the suspects’ relatives, who all live in the same area as her, told her the reputation of the community would be ruined by her report and urged her to drop the case. Meanwhile, her neighbours spread tales about her son, saying that he was “passed around”.
“The stigma is disgusting,” Adara says, speaking in her native language, Hausa. When her son goes outside to play, “neighbourhood kids tease him that he was pimped out”.
Adara faced a backlash from her family as well and has been ostracised since going to the police. “My husband’s family advised him to leave me, and now he has left. I am the only one looking after the kids,” says the mother of four.
“I know people in the community, that their children were raped and they did nothing. They said: ‘Oh, it’s a community thing’, but because I am standing up they are now standing against me,” she says.
“I want the government to fight them. This child is not just my child – it’s also the government’s child”.
Controversial new law
In September, Kaduna’s state governor, Nasir el-Rufai enacted a new law in the highly conservative, majority-Muslim state.
Males convicted of raping children under 14 will now be surgically castrated and executed while women convicts will have their fallopian tubes removed and be executed. For perpetrators who rape children over 14, the punishment is the same, but with life imprisonment instead of execution.
Under Nigeria’s federal law, rapists face between 14 years and life in prison. However, state legislators are allowed to impose their own terms.
“These drastic penalties are required to help further protect children from a serious crime,” El-Rufai said in a statement.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), an independent Nigerian body, however, expressed concern that the law flouts the country’s 2017 Anti-Torture Act. That act outlaws “mutilation such as amputation of essential parts of the body such as the genitalia, ears or tongue and any other part of the body,” NHRC’s executive secretary, Anthony Ojukwu said in a statement.
“There can be no justification for torture, no exceptional circumstance whatsoever.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called the laws “draconian”.
“Evidence shows that the certainty of punishment, rather than its severity, deters crime,” Bachelet said drawing on Nigeria’s low record on rape convictions.
According to the latest available crime data from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, in 2017 there were 2,279 cases of rape and indecent assault reported to police – but no convictions.
Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency, the National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), said there were just 32 successful rape prosecutions between 2019 and 2020 – alarmingly low in a country of more than 200 million people. The NAPTIP, which publishes a federal sex offenders’ register on its website, did not have separate data specifically on child rape.
Shocking abuse
The Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital at Kaduna State University cuts a large unimposing concrete structure against the city’s arid backdrop.
Dr Shuaibu Musa has been a consultant paediatrician here for almost eight years. On a Tuesday evening in September, he had just arrived home from work when an alert he received sent him right back to the hospital. A five-year-old boy had been admitted with diarrhoea. But the medical team suspected it was an assault.
Dr Musa has become used to such alerts. “The sort of abuses we see, you will be shocked,” he says.
Doctors here say they treat children who have been sexually abused every day. It is why Dr Musa and other professionals set up a committee to tackle such cases. Medically, treatment is often focused on the injuries sustained, as some attacks are violent.
On that particular night when he arrived at the ward, he discovered that the parents of the five-year-old were acting suspiciously. The father would not look him in the eye. “They said he was having diarrhoea with blood – now that’s not too common,” says Dr Musa. The symptoms were suggestive of anal rape.
Child victims of this type of rape sometimes lose the ability to control their bowel movements, which doctors had been trained to look out for. “When we probed and probed it turned out to be child sexual abuse.” The parents wanted it kept hidden but Dr Musa and his colleagues insisted on reporting it to the police. “Anytime you see one case and you allow that, it means all children there in that community are no longer safe,” he says.
Dr Musa has learned to bury the anger he feels. He has learned to remain level-headed amid the numerous assaults on children that he has had to treat: A little girl gang-raped during the Muslim Sallah festival; the abuse was so prolonged that she had lost consciousness by the time she was found. Another child forced into prostitution and whose HIV-positive baby, born from rape, was about to be sold. A father who raped his daughter and whose relatives were threatening the mother against reporting the abuse.
In all these cases the hospital had to intervene. “Primarily, our main aim is to protect the child and of course other children in the society.”
Public holidays have come to be known as the darkest days here because that is when the worst cases of abuse happen. During those days children are often in closer proximity to their abusers. Neighbours, friends and classmates are often perpetrators of child sex abuse in Nigeria, according to a 2014 UNICEF report that surveyed more than 4,000 children.
“Most of these abuses are by those [who are] around the child,” Dr Musa says. “Usually, you don’t see people coming from far to come and do abuse. It’s someone in that community.”
“Nobody wants you to report it,” he adds. “People don’t want their family names to be dragged through the mud. And because of that, they will rather keep quiet and say they will handle it within the community.” Last year, UNICEF renewed its call urging Nigeria’s federal government to create safe and secure outlets for children to report cases.
What struck Dr Musa from the patients he has treated was that many child victims went on to abuse others as adults, because psychological support was often never offered to them. Fewer than five out of 100 victims receive support, UNICEF’s report said, echoing Dr Musa’s findings.
It formed the basis of his academic paper and the implementation of a social welfare team trained to look after victims and their families at the hospital. It was also the outcome of these cases that gave him the most cause for concern. None ended in a conviction.
“The few that went to the courts ended up, according to them, settling it out of court again,” he notes.
Reverse stigma
Human rights groups see similar trends. “We’ve not been able to get a conviction out of the many rape cases that we’ve had,” Evon Benson-Idahosa says. She is the founder and executive director of Pathfinders Justice Initiative, a non-profit organisation based in Benin city and the capital Abuja that has been working to end sexual violence in Nigeria for nearly seven years.
A 2018 Nigerian study in the journal African Health Sciences found that only 34 percent of child sexual abuse cases were disclosed to anyone. For years, silencing around the issue of sexual assault has been widespread.
Society often embarrasses or blames the victim into silence, Benson-Idahosa tells Al Jazeera.
The social stigma associated with sexual abuse in the community means most families and victims do not report it immediately. Almost half of Nigerians live in extreme poverty – an indicator of the country’s immense wealth inequality. Some victims and their families, fearing stigmatisation, victim-blaming and lack of money to bring cases to court, choose not to report the abuse to the authorities.
In Adara’s case, according to documents seen by Al Jazeera, it took a while for news of her son’s abuse to reach the correct channels.
Adara told the state medical examiners who treated her son that she initially reported the abuse to a policing outfit made up of community volunteers but action was slow, and the abuse carried on. Then in September, she reported it to the Kaduna State Command. By then her son had endured six months of abuse.
She also said when they first discovered the abuse, her husband agreed to privately settle the issue with the parents of two of the suspects. They paid Adara’s husband 30,000 naira (about $79) as compensation for the crime their sons committed.
Very often, small out-of-court cash settlements are negotiated by religious leaders or town elders to resolve such issues quietly rather than put a family through public scrutiny.
Benson-Idahosa underlined the immense challenge in many communities.
“It’s actually very common that you see these cases ‘resolved’ without any conviction or even prosecution of the case at all. Because we’ve somehow managed to reverse the stigma and place it on the victim and our culture accepts that and promotes it as a way to resolve these sorts of issues,” she explains.
Calls for help
Community stigma but also limited resources can hinder victims and their families’ abilities to search for justice.
When Adara first reported her son’s abuse, detectives from the Intelligence and Investigations Team at Kaduna’s State Command wrote to state hospitals asking for a medical examination and psychiatric evaluation to be conducted. Adara, who works as a seamstress, would have to pay for the examinations herself but there was no way she could afford it. So the hospital sought the help of a local charity, the Jamar Health Foundation.
Five days later, with their help, she was able to take her son to the hospital to be examined. Adara told medical examiners that when she first discovered the abuse, she had pulled maggots from a wound in her son’s anus.
Dr Maryam Jallo, who is the founder of Jamar Health Foundation, was giving a presentation to Nigerian women on rights advocacy when news of Adara’s son reached her via telephone.
After graduating from the Windsor University School of Medicine in Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, she headed back to Nigeria hoping to make a difference in her community and founded the non-profit organisation that has helped pay medical bills for poor patients since 2018. But this case, she says, changed her.
“I was shocked,” the 24-year-old explains, noting Adara’s son’s age. “I had never gotten a rape case.”
But this was to be the first in a series of requests Dr Jallo would receive to help children who had been sexually abused.
Two weeks later, she got another call for a six-year-old girl who needed genital stitches after being raped by her family’s landlord and a month after that, a call for an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped – both cases were in Kaduna city.
According to Dr Jallo, in those instances, police officers quickly arrested the suspects. “That’s the light at the end of the tunnel for us,” she says. Adara’s son’s case, however, is a microcosm of a pervasive problem in Nigeria, she feels, where only a tiny fraction of rapists are brought to justice. She believes it is important that his abusers are found, arrested and punished.
Support for harsher punishments
Sitting in her small office, Dr Jallo reflects on the new bill against paedophiles. “Just because it has been passed doesn’t mean that people are actually implementing it. So, let’s go straight to that,” she says, voicing her support for the regulations that would see child rapists castrated.
At the hospital, Dr Musa also supports the law. Its enactment marks a turning point, he feels.
“With this law, that may put some fear into perpetrators of these incidents,” he says. “People don’t accept that this is happening.”
“We are making progress but it’s very slow; the community is still in denial, unfortunately,” adds Dr Musa. “If we all collectively link up to make sure that nothing goes unreported, nothing goes unpunished, then probably we will be getting there,” he says.
The federal death penalty for crimes is rarely carried out in Nigeria. More than 2,700 people are on death row, according to Amnesty International, but there have been seven executions since 2007 – the last of which was in 2016.
Nigeria has long struggled to deal with child rape. One in 10 boys and one in three girls in Nigeria experience sexual violence before the age of 18, according to UNICEF’s data. The majority of victims treated at the four sexual assault referral centres in Kaduna were children.
Last September, 300 men and boys were rescued by police from a building housing a religious school in Kaduna. Boys aged five and above had been sexually abused, tortured and held captive – in some cases for several years. Eight suspects were arrested. At the time President Muhammadu Buhari urged religious and traditional leaders to work with the authorities to “expose and stop all types of abuse that are widely known but ignored for many years by our communities”.
In Kaduna, violence against children had not been given priority until 2018, when the state adopted the federal Child Rights Act, creating special units within the NSCDC to investigate abuse.
But the problem of child rape goes beyond Nigeria’s northern states.
In the commercial hub, Lagos, 73 percent of survivors treated in 2019 at the Women at Risk International Foundation (WARIF), another referral centre, were under the age of 18. Similarly, a national survey conducted by Nigerian polling service NOIPolls, found that 72 percent of rape victims were aged between one and 15 years old at the time of the incident.
“Rape is both endemic and an epidemic in Nigeria,” says the Pathfinders’ Benson-Idahosa.
Still, she believes castration is “barbaric” and ignores the reality that most paedophiles in Nigeria are not convicted.
“We have policemen who we have had to mobilise to even pursue a case or to do their job and an NGO has to be funding that process,” she says.
Until July this year, the federal code did not even recognise male victims of rape (including boys) until an amendment substituted “woman or girl” to “any person without consent”.
Hoping for justice
Back at Adara’s home, the curtains are drawn. And the family plans to move out of the area, she says.
Over time, Adara has watched her son slowly start to recover. He has been able to sleep through the night again. But she is still struggling.
Her son’s assault shadows her thoughts, she says, while outside, the neighbours continue to mock her.
“Everyone now has their back to me.”
About her son, she says: “If he is able to go back to school, he will learn things and then he will draw past what has happened to him. My hope and prayers are that he grows up to be fine and OK.”
But Adara also knows it is one thing for a perpetrator to be reported for rape in Nigeria, and quite another for them to serve a sentence. She is enraged thinking about her son’s abusers.
“I have been hearing news that once the issue is forgotten, [the suspects] are going to still come back to Kaduna – so it’s not nice,” she says, angry about the lack of accountability.
“It’s not just about helping [my son], but also arresting the perpetrators and getting justice.”
Scrolling through her case notes about Adara and her son, Dr Jallo worries that the community is largely responsible for the paedophiles not being punished.
“An imam actually told the mum to drop the case,” Dr Jallo says. “People hide behind religion. There is this belief that you shouldn’t spread negativity. So, they are saying telling people about paedophilia is spreading negativity.”
“Communities, too, need to come together and actually expose these people and not try to support them,” she adds. “They did something horrible.”
For information and support on sexual assault, consult:
- Cece Yara Foundation on child sexual abuse prevention, Nigeria
- International directory of sexual and domestic violence agencies
Myles Traphagen, Borderlands Program Coordinator for Wildlands Network, walks through a marsh area as the top of a newly erected border wall cuts through the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020, in Douglas, Arizona. (photo: Matt York/AP)
Damage From Border Wall: Blown-Up Mountains, Toppled Cactus
Anita Snow, Associated Press
Snow writes: "Work crews ignite dynamite blasts in the remote and rugged southeast corner of Arizona, forever reshaping the landscape as they pulverize mountaintops in a rush to build more of President Donald Trump's border wall before his term ends next month."
Each blast in Guadalupe Canyon releases puffs of dust as workers level land to make way for 30-foot-tall (9-meter-tall) steel columns near the New Mexico line. Heavy machines crawl over roads gouged into rocky slopes while one tap-tap-taps open holes for posts on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property.
Trump has expedited border wall construction in his last year, mostly in wildlife refuges and Indigenous territory the government owns in Arizona and New Mexico, avoiding the legal fights over private land in busier crossing areas of Texas. The work has caused environmental damage, preventing animals from moving freely and scarring unique mountain and desert landscapes that conservationists fear could be irreversible. The administration says it's protecting national security, citing it to waive environmental laws in its drive to fulfill a signature immigration policy.
Environmentalists hope President-elect Joe Biden will stop the work, but that could be difficult and expensive to do quickly and may still leave pillars towering over sensitive borderlands.
The worst damage is along Arizona’s border, from century-old saguaro cactuses toppled in the western desert to shrinking ponds of endangered fish in eastern canyons. Recent construction has sealed off what was the Southwest’s last major undammed river. It's more difficult for desert tortoises, the occasional ocelot and the world’s tiniest owls to cross the boundary.
“Interconnected landscapes that stretch across two countries are being converted into industrial wastelands,” said Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson.
In the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge near Guadalupe Canyon, biologist Myles Traphagen said field cameras have captured 90% less movement by animals like mountain lions, bobcats and pig-like javelinas over the past three months.
“This wall is the largest impediment to wildlife movement we’ve ever seen in this part of the world,” said Traphagen of the nonprofit Wildlands Network. “It’s altering the evolutionary history of North America.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1982 established the nearly 4-square-mile (10-square-kilometer) refuge to protect water resources and endangered native fish. Diverse hummingbirds, bees, butterflies and bats also live there.
Since contractors for U.S. Customs and Border Protection began building a new stretch of wall there in October, environmentalists estimate that millions of gallons of groundwater have been pumped to mix cement and spray down dusty dirt roads.
Solar power now pumps water into a shrinking pond underneath rustling cottonwood trees. Bullfrogs croak and Yaqui topminnows wiggle through the pool once fed solely by natural artesian wells pulling ancient water from an aquifer.
A 3-mile (5-kilometer) barrier has sealed off a migratory corridor for wildlife between Mexico’s Sierra Madre and the Rocky Mountains to the north, threatening species like the endangered Chiricahua leopard frog and blue-gray aplomado falcon.
The Trump administration says it's completed 430 miles (692 kilometers) of the $15 billion wall and promises to reach 450 miles (725 kilometers) by year’s end.
Biden transition officials say he stands by his campaign promise — “not another foot” of wall. It's unclear how Biden would stop construction, but it could leave projects half-finished, force the government to pay to break contracts and anger those who consider the wall essential to border security.
“Building a wall will do little to deter criminals and cartels seeking to exploit our borders,” Biden's transition team has said. It says Biden will focus on “smart border enforcement efforts, like investments in improving screening infrastructure at our ports of entry, that will actually keep America safer.”
Environmentalists hope for an ally in Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection.
Until construction is stopped, "every day, it will be another another mile of borderlands being trashed,” Serraglio said.
Environmental law attorney Dinah Bear said Biden’s administration could terminate building contracts, which would allow companies to seek settlements. What that would cost isn't clear because the contracts aren't public, but Bear said it would pale in comparison to the price of finishing and maintaining the wall. Military funds reappropriated under a national emergency declared by Trump are now funding the work.
Bear, who worked at the White House's Council on Environmental Quality under Republican and Democratic administrations, said she wants to see Congress set aside money to repair damage by removing the wall in critical areas, buying more habitat and replanting slopes.
Ecologists say damage could be reversed in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where thousands of tree-like saguaros were bulldozed, with some reportedly replanted elsewhere.
They say keeping floodgates open could help ease damage done by damming the San Pedro River, which runs north from just below the Mexican border through the central corridor of the Sierra Madre's “Sky Islands."
These high mountains have ecosystems dramatically different from the desert below, with 300 bird species, including the yellow-billed cuckoo, nesting along what was the Southwest’s last major free-flowing river. The white-nosed, racoon-like coati and the yellow-striped Sonoran tiger salamander also live there.
In the nearby Coronado National Monument, scientists are using cameras to document wildlife as crews prepare to start building. Switchbacks have been slashed into mountainsides, but 30-foot (9-meter) posts aren't yet up along where a Spanish expedition marched through around 1540.
The government plans to install the towering pillars 4 inches (10 centimeters) apart where there are now vehicle barriers a couple of feet high with openings large enough to allow large cats and other animals to cross to mate and hunt.
Biologist Emily Burns of the nonprofit Sky Island Alliance said construction will hurt elf owls, the world’s littlest at less than 5 inches (13 centimeters) tall. The birds are too small to fly over the fence and likely wouldn't know to squeeze through.
“This kind of large-scale disruption can push a species to the brink, even if they aren't threatened,” said Louise Misztal, alliance executive director.
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