Violence of teenage love

Increasingly, times are changing, and the world is witnessing unusual development, including teenagers or children- if you like –  falling in love and willing to kill to preserve their love. Medinat Kanabe takes a look at the rising spate of violence and killing by young people over love

Ibrahim Ogunkoya is a 19-year-old, Oyingbo, Lagos boy with a big dream of becoming an international footballer. He had even begun pursuing his dream, as he had started playing for a local league football team.

Things however came to a halt for him in September, when he was charged to court for allegedly murdering Toyin Eniola, who he claimed snatched his girlfriend. Ibrahim had in a moment of rage, stabbed Eniola in the armpit, inflicting on him a fatal body injury that eventually led to his death.

The teenager, who has been remanded by the Ebute-Metta Chief Magistrates Court sitting at Oyingbo, Lagos state, was arraigned on a two-count charge of conspiracy and murder. He now faces a bleak, bleak future.

Another teenager named Funmilola was also recently arrested for attempting to kill 15 year-old Haliya Odunaya, a senior secondary school student for dating her boyfriend.

Funmi, slashed Haliya’s neck during a heated argument and Haliya, severely injured and bleeding had to be rushed to Stars Clinic along Apapa Road, Ebute-Metta.

It was gathered that Funmi, who is 16 had warned Haliya to stop dating her lover or face trouble.

Just last week in Bauchi State, a 20 year old girl, Fatima Baba Isa, killed a 28 year old lady, Iklima Alhassan for dating her boyfriend, Nasiru Banki, 30.

The above are just a few cases of boys and girls, who have killed or attempted to kill because they felt they were in love.

Temilolu Okeowo, a pastor and founder of the Girls Apostolic Ministry of All Nations, New York and Girls Club of Nigeria spoke to The Nation on the matter, using her teachings as examples. She said the teen-age is that period when one can lay a solid foundation for one’s destiny, adding that once a teenager doesn’t get it right, there’s every likelihood that they’d have great difficulty fulfilling their destiny in the future.

“The teen years are a critical period for learning and development foundation for a young person’s future. Opportunities missed at this period can never be regained. If young people don’t take advantage of these opportunities, they may never develop their full potentials,” she said.

Okeowo, who teaches life skills based on the word of God, which she says doesn’t even permit teenagers to fall in love with anyone else but the man they are legally espoused to, says, “people should fall in love with only their husbands or wives.”

“Pre-marital sex as far as I am concerned is a taboo for teenagers or anyone who is not married. I don’t encourage girls to have romantic relationships or boyfriends in their teens because to start with, there’s no mention or approval of boyfriend in the bible; secondly, it distracts them spiritually and more often than not, derails them from the path of their destiny. When your heart is clouded by romance, fantasies, love songs etc, how can the spirit of God which will ignite your inner mind and show you your divine path, function?”

Asked if love can make teenagers kill, she said yes. “Love can make teenagers kill because when they fall in love, they do so passionately and lose all sense of proportion. Teenagers live in a world of their own, they allow their emotions to rule their intellect and they do everything with so much gusto.”

In order that they do not get reckless, she said parents must first have God. Without the fear of God, she said no parent can effectively bring up a child the right way. As it is, she said too many parents have a faulty upbringing.

“Aside this, the world out there is hostile and everyone wants to be loved and made to feel special. Parents have to love their gifts from God passionately and express it at every given opportunity before any wolf in sheep’s clothing takes advantage. So many parents are too busy to give their children the required attention, especially in their impressionable years when they are confused by divergent views about life.

“Without wasting time, they must prayerfully, lovingly and appealingly discourage them by drumming the risks into their ears and letting them know the beneficial advantages in waiting till the right time.”

She said the dangers of getting involved in romance and emotional relationships at a very early age include low academic performance, gangster-ism, unprotected and more frequent sexual intercourse, addiction to pornography, unwanted pregnancy, emotional distress, suicidal behaviour, abortion, early parenthood and dropping out of school.

Parents speak

Mrs Bose Ironsi of Women’s Rights and Health Project and mother of three said, children need the guidance of their parents to have direction in life. “For a child to have that kind of freedom to be able to fight over a boy or girl, it means there is something wrong in the home. Lack of communication between the children and parents is a big problem in some homes. Parents should be able to communicate with their children and give them all the necessary information they need to have at certain age, so that they will not go and get the information outside and get misled.

“I am free with my children; I play with them, dance with them, listen to them and sing with them. Because of this, they can tell me anything and they listen to me. Parents should engage their children, understand who their friends are, have more close time with them, even if it means missing work for a day. Find out their talent and help them to pursue it, so they will be busy with it.”

Mrs Ironsi also said children are very energetic, so parents should multi-task them and not forget to teach them sex education.

Pastor Agu, another parent, said there are different types of parents; some encourage their children when they do wrong while some don’t.

He said “It takes God’s intervention for people to lead good lives and it is the duty of parents to speak to their children. It is advisable that from the day a child is born, the parents speak into their ears, telling them what to do and not to do.”

He said many parents are so busy that they leave their children in the hands of maids who don’t have the time to take proper care of them nor have the capacity to talk to them about life and what is expected of them.

Another thing, he said “is the ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude of Nigerians, where they don’t make attempt to correct other people’s children. Children are for everyone, so let us correct them whether they are ours or not; otherwise tomorrow, someone will just walk into your kitchen and steal away your pot of soup.

For Mr Patrick Onaighise, parents have a great role to play in correcting this wrong. He says, they should not pretend as if they don’t know what their children are doing, when in actual fact, they do. They should call them and speak to them about the possible consequences of their actions, should they make mistakes. “If you want your child to make you proud, teach them how to differentiate between, good, bad and ugly.

He should know that if he gives the key to his room to his friends to rape someone, even if he doesn’t participate in the rape, he has committed a crime.” Onaighise said.

A psychologist speaks

When asked if it is possible for children to fall in love psychologically, Dr. Leonard Okonkwo, a clinical psychologist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, said: “I like the fact that you said psychologically. There are different ways of looking at it: morally, religiously, psychologically. Psychologically, it is possible. Love or romantic feeling is an idealised feeling of attachment and it starts way back from the very beginning.

“From the psychoanalytical point of view, when the child is between the age of 0-1, he possesses an instinctual libido, also known as sexual energy that develops in five stages. The first stage is the oral stage, when the child expresses sexual impulses through the mouth. This can be through feeding from his mother’s breast and from the oral exploration of his or her environment, i.e. the tendency to place objects in the mouth. He begins to form ego at this stage.

“Then it moves to the anal stage, which is from eighteen months to three years, wherein the infant’s erogenous zone changes from the mouth to the anus (the lower digestive tract), while the ego formation continues. Toilet training is the child’s key anal stage experience.

“The next stage is the phallic stage, which is between the ages of three and six years, where the child is involved in infantile masturbation and he is attached to the parent of the opposite sex. He is seen always touching his private parts and you hear parent threatening to cut off his penis if he doesn’t keep his hands away.

“They gratify physical curiosity by exploring each other and their genitals and so learn physical differences between male and female and the gender difference between boys and girls.

“”Then later on in life, he moves to the latent stage which is from six years to puberty, where the child consolidates the character habit he or she developed in the three earlier stages of psychological and sexual development.

“The last stage is the adult sexual stage or genital stage, where they begin to have attachment and love relationships with the opposite sex. Also this stage is centred upon the genitalia but the sexuality is consensual and adult rather than solitary or infantile.

So children can fall in love because it has to do with emotional attachment. For example, how old was Romeo and Juliet when they fell in love? The thing here is that, if there is a problem at any of the stages, there will be a problem of adjusting later on in life. But because of the parents’ threatening of the child and the society, the child may not go to the extreme.”

Dr. Okonkwo also said that “Different levels of the influence of the parents or the society or what we call the super-ego, has different influences on the individual; so different people have different level of acceptability of the expression of these feelings. So such people are likely to get out of hand.

“What I am saying is that the parents are the ones who say “don’t go there, don’t do this in the early stage, to keep the child away from these ills until they get to adulthood, when they are old enough to control their feelings.”

First Published in The Nation of December 13, 2015