Compliments of the season to you all…Sure you had a great Christmas and Boxing Day, unwinding and letting down your hairs…This being the last Sunday of the year and my last piece of the year, permit me to wish you dear highly esteemed readers and believers, an unprecedentedly prosperous New Year in advance.

Back to my advocacy adventure, I embarked on last week asking us to mind our language about what we call, ‘Child Marriage’ and ‘Child Prostitution.’

You will recall that last week, I coined ‘Domesticated Child Sexual Abuse or Molestation,’ as the real description for what we today refer to as ‘Child Marriage.’

Kindly note that this is not a battle of semantics…It is a call for a review of the use of nomenclature, which waters down or hides the monumental evil and insurmountable consequences of a practice.

You see, to agree that forcefully giving out a child to a man or woman is ‘Child Marriage’ will mean to say that a paedophile is a husband, a sexually molested child is a wife, and the suspects, who forcefully joined them in ‘crimetrimony’ are in-laws.

I think I have done considerable justice to the first part of this discussion, largely last week and briefly this week. My focus this week is what is generally called, ‘Child Prostitution.’

I think this industry doesn’t exist as we describe it today. Prostitution suggests a voluntarily involvement in commercial sex for material gains. It suggests voluntary capacity to negotiate sex for commercial benefits. The phrase ‘Child Prostitution’ as it is used today may suggest that children voluntarily gets involved in prostitution and therefore could be referred to as ‘Children Prostitutes.’ Please note that the precious children, who are today referred to as ‘Child Prostitutes’ are Child Sex Slaves, who are being mercilessly robbed of their God-ordained innocence and dignity of human person. This kind of brazen robbery of our precious children of their virtues earn the robbers huge pecuniary gains. This illicit trade of Child Sex Slavery fetch the perpetrators billions of dollars. The robber has everything to GAIN for it and our precious children have everything to lose for it.

These precious souls are held in the captivity of sex slavery with fear, intimidation and all kinds of threats. Apart from the fact that their lives are threatened by their slave masters, their being used as sex slaves is a threat to theirs precious lives. Many have actually been killed in the process of being used as sex slaves.

In signing out today, I will like to submit that we live in a perverted world, where our precious children suffer bloodcurdling and almost irreparable legion of abuses and yet our insensitive world hold the children responsible.

Our precious children suffer double jeopardy. They are ABUSED and ACCUSED. The abusers do not take RESPONSIBILITY not to turning a new leaf. Deliberately or by default, they come up with narratives, shrouded in misleading labels like ‘Child Marriage,’ ‘Child Prostitution’ and many more.

Unfortunately, some of the genuine defenders of the rights of our precious children, both individuals and institutions, in some cases either use or coin these labels, which agree with the narratives of the abusers, without carefully examining same and its impact.

This two-part series is an attempt to expose this subtle game of abusing our precious children and finding convenient narratives to distract the best of us and the rest of the public from the real issues. This subtle tricks present our precious children as the ABUSED and the ACCUSED, thereby sealing their fate and sentencing them to a life of unchecked and perpetual abuse.

In the year 2016, by the grace of God, to take this discussion further, our Child Protection Culture Academy will hold a session of its Basic Classes, discussing Building A Culture of Child Protection in Africa: Minding Our Language…We hope to keep you posted.
Do have an INSPIRED week and New Year Celebrations with your precious family members.

I am Taiwo AKINLAMI and I remain Sober on my knees on this LORD’S day.
W: http://www.taiwoakinlami.com T: 08033620843 T: @taiwoakinlami B: http://www.taiwoakinlami.wordpress.com