Professor Ayodele delivering the lecture
In his Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Littoral University, Porto Novo, Republic of Benin, Nigeria’s Professor Johnson Ayodele, has listed some factors that make some Nigerians unwilling to report cases of crime to requisite authorities.
Speaking on the topic, Normative Capital and Reporting Practices among Crime Victims in South-Western Nigeria (Yoruba of Nigeria), before a packed hall, Ayodele, a Professor of criminology and security studies and Dean of the Faculty of Law, Littoral University, said that the attitude of security agents often dissuade even victims of crime to make official reports.
He urged women to take a front-row position in influencing their families to report crimes and speak up against abnormalities and issues that offend morality of the family and society at large.
Ayodele rallied women to deploy their enormous influence to teach children security consciousness and encourage schools to complement their efforts with structured instruction.
He regretted that most Yoruba mothers pursue career visibility, gender parity, and other ephemeral vanities at the detriment of family and societal values.
On the issue of same-sex marriage, he wondered: “Is it not embarrassing that the West lectures contemporary Yoruba female parents on breastfeeding culture via television advertorials? What were Yoruba women doing when, at the macro level, same-sex marital deviance developed into unreported deviation whose adoption in the West has morphed into a norm for global interaction? Among the Yoruba people, womanhood is facing the threat of being culturally overthrown. If the natural family members do not embrace the triumphs of normative capital for their reporting engagements, they may later have to report their grievances to inorganic law enforcers. For example, if women had appropriately reported their objection to the conjugal oddity at the time, the idea of same-sex marriage came up overseas, the concept would have been legally dead on arrival at the Nigerian shore.”
Using the South-western part of Nigeria as an instance, Ayodele who also doubles as a part-time lecturer of criminology and research methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels of Unicaf University, Cyprus, submitted that the police and other anti-crime agencies should share in the blame of making crime-reporting unattractive to victims.
He said: “The police should be concerned about preventing crimes, ethical apprehension of offenders involved in crimes they fail to foil, and protecting life and property. However, experience shows that the police are not indicative of a fact-based justice system in Yoruba land.”
The Professor of Criminology argued that the “police exhibit unrepentantly castigatory, bribe-collecting, and justice-perverting dispositions that seem to deepen the suspicion and indifference of women (half of the Yoruba population) to the police. From this background, the Yoruba belief that a kii t’ile ejo de wa d’ore (one does not conclude a formal lawsuit with friendship intentions) helps to clarify the dilemma.”
This conviction, he said, “excludes the police from the altruistic crime management approach among the Yoruba people. It underscores the inherent inequity in the cultural conception of justice by the authors of colonial police and their Yoruba victims as well. The reasons undergirding the reporting of more or fewer crimes to the formal or informal justice system remain empirically vague. As a result, public policy must act outside the box. It should domicile the formal and informal social control units in the same department within the broader justice system to allow complainants to report crimes to their choices.”
According to Professor Ayodele, both crime commission and crime reporting are acts, stressing that while crime is a triggering act, reporting responds to the usually unpleasant triggers.
He recommended that public policy should motivate Yoruba people to assert their cultural coexistence, adding that “this action will help them habitualize their purposeful interventions in crime management through normative crime reporting instead of vicariously sharing victims’ pain for sustainable public safety and vulgarizing crime reporting.”
