I finally watched the video of the Ikorodu man whipping, with sadistic relish, a little child. I had avoided it deliberately.
I scrolled past every time it surfaced in my feeds, telling myself I already knew what I would find. I did not need to see it to know that it would disturb me. There are things the mind understands perfectly without being shown the pictures.
A grown man brutalising a small child is one of them.
But I watched it eventually, something I wish I had not done.
What stays with me is not just the violence, but also the imbalance. The man had the strength, the authority and the rage. The child had none of those things.
All he had was the vulnerability of being small while an adult decided, for reasons that will never be adequate, to make him the target of something much larger than any offence a child could commit.
There is something almost unbearable about watching a child beaten with such ferocity by the one person he is supposed to trust without question. He cannot possibly understand why the man meant to protect him has become the thing he needs protecting from. That confusion is its own injury, separate from the welts.
The man has reportedly been arrested. Good. I hope the law does what it says on the tin. I still cannot stop thinking about the person holding the phone. Why did he or she keep shooting? There may be circumstances I am not aware of. The person filming may have been afraid or may have attempted an intervention that failed. Or he/she may have made the recording deliberately, on the calculation that evidence would eventually matter more than intervention. I am not in a position to convict a stranger on the strength of 90 seconds of footage.
Still, the question will not leave me alone. At what point does watching become a form of participation.
We live in an age in which almost everything gets recorded, and sometimes that habit serves justice rather well, since the camera can be the only witness willing to testify There is also a darker possibility lurking underneath the useful one, which is that we have grown so used to consuming other people’s suffering through a screen that the instinct to document now arrives before the instinct to stop it. A phone occupies one hand. A voice occupies none. Somewhere in that arithmetic an intervention went missing. I notice its absence more than I would like to.Then there is the other question, the one I keep circling back to even though I already know it leads nowhere useful. What did the child do? Did he break something or lie or steal? Did he fail to answer quickly enough or was he only being a child, at the precise moment a grown man happened to be carrying some entirely unrelated grievance that had been looking for somewhere to land? What was gnawing at the father? Did the father get burn in sports betting or lottery?It does not matter, in the end, which of these it was.
Children are difficult, stubborn, noisy, occasionally infuriating little creatures and discipline exists to show them where the boundary y6r two we allowed ourselves to confuse the two and we still quote scripture at each other to justify it, as though a shepherd’s rod and a cane were ever the same instrument.
What frightens me more than the video itself is what happened after the camera stopped. Did the child cry himself to sleep? Did he lie awake wondering what he had done to deserve it? Did he wake the next morning and look at his father differently, having learned, far too early, that the hand meant to feed him is also capable of this? Those are the images that follow me.
The video has almost disappeared. Our outrage cycle runs on a roughly 72-hour clock, after which the algorithm moves us on to the next terrible thing, and the last one is filed away as though resolved by our having watched it. But that child does not get 72hours. He has to wake up inside whatever happened to him for considerably longer than that, and an arrest, however satisfying it feels to the rest of us scrolling past on our phones, is not the same thing as a child being safe.It is why the arrest should be the beginning of something rather than the end of it. The boy needs to be examined, listened to and protected and somebody in a position of actual authority needs to establish whether Ikorodu was witnessing one catastrophic afternoon or one visible chapter in a much longer story.Children trust adults with an ease that borders on the reckless, by which I mean they have no choice in the matter. They assume the hands that feed them will not turn against them. They assume home is the one place the world cannot follow them into. There is something close to tragedy in a child discovering, this early, that neither assumption can be relied upon. I watched that video reluctantly, but not casually. The real question, long after the man has been processed is whether that particular child will ever again feel entirely safe in a room with an adult. Let me not lie, my immediate desire to have have him tethered to a stake and have him set upon by five elite thugs.
Bamidele Johnson is a Writer, Journalist and Media Consultant.
