By Kate Henshaw
I love watching crime, thrillers and court- room or legal-based movies. It is quite intriguing for me to see how the perpetrator of a particular crime could get away with it due to lack of sufficient evidence, how the detectives arrive at a conclusion that leads to the capture of a criminal, or the thrill of the chase when the killer tries to escape from the police.

CSI Miami, New York, Las Vegas, NCIS, Boston Legal, Law and Order-Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit (SVU) are all quite detailed and exciting programmes that I love to watch and if I do not have the time, I record them to be viewed later.

This brings me to my above title. When the captive begins to identify with his or her captor, identified as a defence mechanism initially, out of fear of more violence, resists rescue attempts, refuses to testify against the captor, all these are symptoms of Stockholm syndrome. For the purpose of this write up, the captor is a male and the captive, female.

When a woman is in a controlling and abusive relationship, the characteristics earlier mentioned are easily recognized and exhibited. Friends and relatives seem helpless, amazed and shocked at the situation when their loved one returns to an abusive relationship or offers excuses as to why there should be no prosecution or arrest of the abuser but rather blame themselves for their misfortune. You hear comments like” I know what he has done is bad, but he loves me”, “It is not his fault, it is mine”, “I should have kept quiet while he talked, you know how stressed he is”.

Since the ABSU rape took Nigerians by storm, more reports have emerged about continued violence against young girls in the universities, in off campus accommodation, against single women in relationships and married women. The more reports emerge, the less we see the police authorities do something about the perpetrators of such heinous acts except for the case of Mr Christopher Kola Arowolo (who murdered his wife in cold blood).

It saddens my heart and I even get angry, shouting inside that “this is not love o”! A few incidents have been reported recently, one of which is that of a lady whose boyfriend/ lover cut her ear off with a broken piece of glass because he was angry that she came home 30minutes late from work.

He did not sit down to discuss with her or ask her why nor even think. What if she was unavoidably late but he kept the anger inside till the wee hours of the morning when they were both asleep and then woke up to pummel her with a bottle which eventually broke and he then used a piece of it to cut off her ear, all the while shouting “I am going to kill you”. Sad to say, the ear could not be stitched back on and the woman in question does not want to file charges against her lover because she loves him so much.

The other incident saw a woman lose her eye, courtesy of her husband who had stabbed her in the eye, then locked her in the house with their baby and fled to another town.

Immuned to her cries of help and plea to take her to hospital, he did not look back. She managed to call her brother who lived in another town and therefore could not immediately come to her rescue and all she kept saying was for him to call her husband to take her to the hospital.

The same husband who had just inflicted such harm on you without thinking twice? He is rumoured to have been in debt and having consulted a herbalist, was asked to bring his wife’s eye for a concoction that will cause the debt to be erased or forgotten. This is the woman he had vowed, in the presence of God to cherish and to hold, in sickness and in health.

Her parents had their misgivings about the man in question but she turned a deaf ear to them and went ahead to get pregnant for him. He was said to be the cynosure of all ladies eyes and so to her, he was quite a catch. Selling her car a few months into the marriage so that they could feed and maintain their home was not enough of a sacrifice for him, he had to go for the jugular and take her sight! She too has refused to press charges. One seems tongue-tied and at a loss how to help these women who refuse to help themselves and that is why these acts have continued unabated. Could it have something to do with upbringing, low self esteem, fear of being alone, fear of what society would think should one’s relationship or marriage fail? Or is it poverty? What then I ask? Could it be the way we as mothers have raised our men folk, with little or no regard for the women, and to feel free to throw their weight around, to see women as nothing more than possessions that can be disposed of and dealt with at will?

I have taught my daughter to believe in herself, told her that there was nothing she could not achieve if she put her mind to it. The world around us is changing and women are presidents, prime ministers and heads of corporate institutions, and are proving their mettle. Let us find a cure for this syndrome; it portends a bleak future for our daughters and sons.