BEYOND THE OFFENDER: RE-IMAGINING VICTIMHOOD, INSTITUTIONAL TREATMENT AND STRUCTURAL RIGHTS FOR SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigerian criminal justice continues to treat the survivor of sexual violence as an instrument of the prosecution rather than as a bearer of rights. The State owns the charge, controls the evidence and collects the penalty, while the survivor supplies testimony and absorbs the cost. This article argues that the problem is not an absence of law but a misalignment of law. The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 205, the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 205 and the Evidence Act 20 each contain protective provisions, yet those provisions are discretionary in form, fragmented across jurisdictions and not supported by funding or institutions. Drawing on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, the jurisprudence of the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice and comparative experience from Kenya, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the article examines the survivor’s passage through the police station, the medical examination, the family and the courtroom, and identifies the points at which the system converts a victim of crime into a casualty of process. It finds that judicial reliance on a corroboration warning, the leave-based structure of the rape-shield provision in section 234 of the Evidence Act, the absence of a State-funded compensation scheme and the confinement of the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act to the Federal Capital Territory together account for much of the gap between statutory promise and practical outcome. It also examines the counselling and referral centres established by States, which have grown from fifteen in 209 to fifty in 2025 but remain largely donor-dependent. It recommends a statutory charter of survivors’ rights, statutory State funding and coverage for counselling and referral centres, a national victims’ compensation fund modelled on the existing trafficking victims’ trust fund, mandatory forensic standards, specialised courts operating under fixed timelines, and the amendment of the Evidence Act to put the treatment of a complainant’s sexual history and the corroboration warning on a principled statutory footing.