The Unknown Woman: Protecting Her Womanity as a Sine Qua Non to Preserving the Family Unit in Nigeria

Abstract

The family unit is the basic unit of society and same cannot (literally speaking) be birthed without the woman or its foundation concretized without her nurture. However, it seems from happenings in the Nigerian society that the Nigerian woman is faced with some challenges that endangers her well-being, her role as a vessel of demographic growth and her indispensable nurturing function in the home. Many of these challenges appear to be caused by the masculine gender. Though and sadly so in some cases as would be shown anon, women themselves are the harbinger of some of these problems. Canvassing the emancipation of the woman has been the focus of many female gender rights activists and this paper aims to contribute to same vide an examination of the challenges that face the female folk in Nigeria and in extension the family unit with its negative effects on the larger society from a social cum legal perspective or discourse. The spectrum of this discourse will traverse issues like abandonment, effects of superstitious belief in witchcraft, death in the course of earning a living, break-up of the family unit due to meddlesomeness of third parties, sexual violence against women and alleged complicity of law enforcement agents in shielding its perpetrators and a host of other varied issues.