The Principle
There is a particular kind of injustice that wears the face of justice. It arrives not in the form of oppression but in the form of protection — legitimate, necessary, hard-won protection — and it does its damage quietly, from the inside, long after the original wrong it was designed to correct has been named and addressed. It is the injustice that emerges when protection becomes unaccountable. When the shield becomes a weapon. When victimhood becomes a privilege.
Let me be precise about what this essay is and what it is not. It is not an argument against protection. Every framework of protection ever built — legal, moral, social — was built to correct a real injustice. Women protected from domestic violence because domestic violence against women is real and epidemic. Queer people protected from persecution because that persecution is real and murderous. Immigrants and refugees protected from discrimination because their vulnerability upon arrival is real and documented. The historically colonised protected from ongoing exploitation because that exploitation is real and still operational. None of this is in dispute.
What is in dispute is the assumption that protection, once granted, requires no further scrutiny. That the protected are, by virtue of their protection, incapable of harm. That the history of suffering confers a kind of moral immunity — a privilege of victimhood — that places certain groups beyond honest examination. This assumption is not compassion. It is the abandonment of the most vulnerable: those harmed not by the traditional oppressor, but by the protected themselves.
Every group that has ever been shielded has, in some form and to some degree, turned that shield against someone even more vulnerable. This is not a comfortable observation. It is not meant to be. It is meant to be true.
The woman who cannot be the abuser
In Nigeria, as across much of Africa, the dominant narrative of domestic violence is gendered in one direction: men abuse women. This is statistically accurate in the majority of adult intimate partner violence cases, and the framework of protection built around it — however inadequate in practice — is legitimate and necessary. But there is another category of domestic violence that this narrative cannot accommodate, and in its inability to accommodate it, leaves its victims entirely undefended.
Children. And their abusers are disproportionately women.
The evidence is not hidden. It is simply not discussed. Across Nigeria, cases of women burning children with liquefied plastic, pouring hot water on toddlers, cutting off fingers and toes, inflicting sustained physical and psychological torture on children in their care — mostly children who are not their own, nephews, nieces, stepchildren, wards — are documented with grim regularity. These are not aberrations. They represent a pattern that any honest examination of child abuse data in this country cannot ignore.
The cultural narrative that positions women as inherently nurturing and inherently protective of children does real harm here. It delays recognition. It delays intervention. It discourages reporting, because the report itself feels like a violation of something the society holds sacred — the image of the mother, the caregiver, the woman as refuge. And while the society is busy protecting that image, the child is being burned.
Protection that cannot see its own blind spots is not protection. It is a hierarchy with better public relations.
The man who cannot be the victim
There is a man somewhere in Nigeria right now who is being abused by his wife or female partner. She may be hitting him. She may be degrading him systematically, controlling him financially, isolating him from his family, threatening to destroy his reputation. He will not report it. He cannot report it. Not because no harm is being done, but because the society has decided, in advance, that this particular harm is not possible. A man cannot be a victim of a woman. The assumption of male physical and social superiority forecloses the conversation before it begins.
I have seen this. Not once but many times. A woman slapping a man with force and contempt, in public, and the man absorbing it in silence because the alternative — defending himself, reporting it, naming it for what it is — carries a social cost he cannot afford. He will be laughed at. He will be called weak. He will be given a derogatory label that strips him of dignity far more effectively than the slap did. So he says nothing. And the abuse continues.
The legal architecture built to protect women from domestic violence — built correctly, built necessarily — has almost no language for him. In some cases it has been weaponised against him: false allegations made by a partner who understands that the system’s default assumption will work in her favour. The protection meant to serve justice becomes, in these instances, an instrument of its opposite.
This is not an argument for dismantling protection for women. It is an argument for building protection that is honest about the full range of human capacity for harm — regardless of gender. A justice system that protects some victims while rendering others invisible is not a justice system. It is a preference system.
The feminist who became the thing she fought
African feminism, at its best, is one of the most necessary and courageous intellectual traditions on the continent. The women who built it — who fought for property rights, for bodily autonomy, for access to education and economic participation, for freedom from violence sanctioned by custom and religion — were fighting real battles against real systems of oppression. That struggle is unfinished. It deserves support, not condescension.
But something has happened to a visible and vocal strand of contemporary African feminism that deserves to be named honestly: it has drifted from the fight for equality into the performance of hostility. Not feminism — misandry. The difference matters enormously, because feminism, properly understood, is a fight for the dignity of all people against systems that diminish women. Misandry is simply the substitution of one target for another. It does not dismantle hierarchy. It reverses it.
The African feminist who cannot bring herself to condemn female perpetrators of child abuse because it disrupts the narrative is not fighting for children. The feminist movement that silences women who hold dissenting views — about marriage, about religion, about the complexity of African gender dynamics — is replicating the same epistemic violence it was built to resist. The loudest voices in any movement are rarely the most representative, and in the space created by noise, the most vulnerable are frequently abandoned.
The women most harmed by African patriarchy — the rural woman, the poor woman, the woman without education or legal recourse, the woman whose suffering does not translate into social media engagement — are often the least served by the mainstream feminist conversation, which has increasingly become a discourse of the privileged about the privileged. When the movement becomes more interested in defeating men than in serving women, it has traded its purpose for its resentment.
By Kenneth Eze