Emeka* said the lecturer called them “childish” if they resisted his advances. He would put on pornography and force them to watch, then begin touching himself. Emeka recalled those nights in vivid detail. Three boys, all under 18, were living under the same roof with the man, a Ph.D. candidate who posed as a lecturer and was known on campus as Felix,* at the invitation of parents who believed he would prime their children for university admission.
It seemed like an ideal arrangement on paper: a supposed lecturer with spare rooms, eager students from modest backgrounds and the promise of academic success. What could go wrong? But survivors described a yearlong cycle of coercion, threats and shame that none dared report to the police, to the University of Lagos or even to their own families, who had entrusted them to Felix’s care.
Emeka’s recollection matched several anonymous social-media posts and other survivors’ accounts. But that’s as far as it went.
He never reported what happened to him. Like many male survivors of sex harassment and abuse in Nigeria, he faced a culture that denies men can be victims and institutions unprepared to help them when they are abused.
Emeka’s story represents a corrosive pattern at the University of Lagos and across Nigeria, where male survivors are silenced by institutional apathy and patriarchal norms.
Sexual corruption, according to Transparency International, encompasses a broader range of abuses, always involving three key elements: abuse of power, the promise of a favor or advantage and a sexual act.
Despite reforms that the University of Lagos instituted after the 2019 BBC #SexForGrades exposé, a documentary into how lecturers in prominent West African universities sexually harassed their students with the promise of good grades, male students who face such abuse grapple with numerous unenforced policies, societal stigma and a justice system that dismisses male trauma.
Male survivors who do find the courage to seek help often encounter institutions unprepared to receive them. At the University of Lagos, like many other institutions in Nigeria, the infrastructure for supporting male survivors exists largely on paper.
The university announced the creation of a task force as part of its renewed attention to any form of sexual abuse on campus in 2019. In a statement to the press, Taiwo Oloyede, then the principal assistant registrar for communication and now the deputy registrar and admissions officer of the school, said the task force “has the mandate to examine the extant University of Lagos policy on sexual harassment, receive complaints from faculties, departments and other units concerning matters that border on sexual harassment, and recommend appropriate sanctions for offenders.”
Oloyede added that it would “put forward counseling and other therapies for mitigating the adverse effects of sexual harassment on victims” and report monthly to the vice-chancellor.
A 2017 Senate-approved Sexual Harassment Policy, reviewed for this piece, explicitly bans “unwelcome advances” between “persons of the same sex or opposite sex,” requires staff-student romantic or sexual relationships to be disclosed in writing to the vice-chancellor and pledges a “non-sexist, non-discriminatory, non-exploitative working, living and study environment” for everyone on and off campus.
The policy’s six objectives include raising awareness across campus, empowering survivors, ensuring gender-neutral support and imposing sanctions ranging from counseling to expulsion, or forcing an abuser to sit out the academic year. Complaints can be submitted confidentially, verbally or in writing, with designated officers and whistle-blowers guaranteed protection.
When the university was asked for data on sexual harassment complaints that have been filed since this policy was implemented, the counseling department had no exact number.
On paper, the policy seems airtight. But a campuswide assessment of awareness regarding sexual harassment reporting mechanisms showed significant gaps in information dissemination and institutional transparency. Earlier visits had established that while the Dean of Student Affairs’ office reportedly handles matters relating to student welfare, including sexual harassment issues, there was no clear indication that students are using this as a channel for reporting. Students’ responses to questions about sexual misconduct on campus revealed troubling gaps in basic knowledge.
In interviews, some students appeared unsure that men could become victims of sexual corruption, while others were certain that men could not be subject to sexual harassment or corruption at all. Oluwatoyin Aregbesola, the head of the University of Lagos’s counseling unit, was not surprised by the responses. Male students who are subject to sexual abuse, she said, do not always see themselves as victims.
None of the students interviewed on campus for this story could describe sexual harassment reporting mechanisms in detail. None had seen posters, helplines or signs indicating the school had an anti-sexual harassment policy, let alone one that applied to male survivors.
The head of the school’s counseling unit told PassBlue in an interview that the sexual harassment policy is available on the university website. While that is true, the document was buried in the footer of the site. Other post pages that should redirect to the school’s handbook or a revised policy held information for a webinar and a notice for course registration.
The counseling official also said that students are educated about sexual misconduct and romantic relationships with lecturers during the orientation week, but we found that this was not always the case. The university held its orientation for part-time students on May 30, and there was no discussion on sexual harassment.
During the discussion with university officials from the counseling unit, they described an extensive network of reporting channels, from “the VC down to even the hostel managers” and including religious leaders like pastors and imams. They pointed to a “Safeguarding Office” located at the Academic Publishing Center as the primary handler of sexual harassment complaints.
However, when asked about the task force established to report monthly to the Vice-Chancellor, Aregbesola said she was not privy to such information. This fragmentation of responsibility across multiple offices makes it difficult for students to know where to turn when facing sexual harassment, enabling a culture of silence that protects perpetrators. And although a building has been designated as the Safeguarding Office, these reporters found that it is not fully operational.
A 2018 study surveyed 648 students across Lagos higher institutions, including Lagos University, found that male students reported being victims of sexual harassment, challenging assumptions about who experiences sexual abuse in academic settings.
The research documented patterns of harassment that involved students gaining “unfair advantage, acquiring perks and privileges” — precisely the transactional dynamic that defines sexual corruption.
The Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency (DSVA) said only 9 percent of 5,000 cases of sexual assault logged since 2019 involve adult males, a statistic reflecting nationwide underreporting, according to Tumininu Oni, a case manager at the agency.
These official numbers only hint at the scope of the problem, according to experts who work directly with survivors.
Lagos University’s counseling unit could recall only one case involving a male student reporting sexual harassment, from five years ago. The perpetrator was removed from the system, and the student graduated “without any molestation or fear,” according to the counselor.
Oni attributed the low reporting rate among men to stigma and systemic gaslighting. “Of course, we have the stigma and the cultural silence, deep-rooted patriarchy that equates masculinity with strength and invulnerability,” Oni said. This drives most male survivors underground, leaving policies untested and perpetrators unpunished.
Young boys from low-income communities are particularly vulnerable to sexual corruption, a form of sexual abuse rooted in exploitation and manipulation, where influential individuals promise money, gifts or other incentives in exchange for sexual acts. In countries like Nigeria, where nearly 87 million people live below the poverty line and more than half of the child population works to support their families financially, such exploitation is disturbingly prevalent.
Survivors, many of them minors, are coerced into silence, either out of fear or because they have internalized the transactional nature of these abuses as a means of survival, Oni said. In 2024 alone, at least 33 boys were reported to the agency as molested by an older person. Oni said many of the sexual corruption cases reported to the agency occur within master-apprentice relationships, where the apprentice, often a boy under the age of 18, is abused and feels compelled to remain silent to keep his job.
Sexual corruption takes many forms: sometimes, victims seek advancement through sexual compliance; other times, they comply simply to maintain their basic position or livelihood.
In one case, Oni said: “The man would call [the apprentice] in and sexually abuse him. [He] will also tell him to go and bring his friends. . . . If the boy refuses, [the abuser] is going to beat him a lot, and he’s going to tell him that he’s going to eject him from his shop. The boy was really afraid.”
In a similar case discovered by these reporters, a 46-year-old man identified simply as Ephraim trafficked a teenage boy from his home in Benue to Lagos — a journey of about 900 kilometers (about 560 miles), on the pretext of finding him a job. But in Lagos, Ephraim himself barely had a job. He worked as a laborer in a bakery and lived in a shared apartment that the bakery owner provided for his workers.
Ephraim abused the boy in the bakery dormitory. When the owner reported the crime, Ephraim was arrested but released after two weeks. The bakery owner said he was pressured into signing a statement withdrawing the case, and the teenage boy was sent back to Benue, in north-central Nigeria, beyond Lagos’s jurisdiction. There, cases involving minors hinge on live testimony.
“If the survivor is not around, you can’t bring anything before the alleged perpetrator,” Oni said.
Back home in Benue, the boy never told his father what had happened to him.
Amanda Iheme, a clinical psychologist in Lagos, said shame is a possible reason the boy, like many others in his situation, would not disclose his abuse to his parents. “The solution for sexual assault and abuse is silence. Forgive the perpetrator. Don’t speak about it, because if you do, you bring shame upon us,” she said, referring to the fears that plague survivors. “Meanwhile, underneath all of this, there is a little boy there who has been violated, who has been taken advantage of, and doesn’t know how to respond to it.”
Also far less helpful is the Nigerian media’s portrayal of sexual violence against men, which reveals a toxic interplay of societal taboos and sensationalism. Analyses of Nigerian dailies from the 1990s to 2010s, through the newspaper archival platform Archivi.ng, show that reports involving male survivors are often framed through homophobic tropes rather than human rights violations.
Terms like “sodomized” or “homosexual act” dominate headlines, weaponizing Nigeria’s cultural and legal hostility toward queerness (codified in laws like the 2014 Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act) to sensationalize crimes while erasing the survivors’ trauma.
For instance, when another 16-year-old boy was assaulted by a Lagos hotelier, Opara Macdonald, news coverage fixated on the “abominable” nature of the act rather than the violence itself. This mirrors historical patterns: a 2017 study found that 62 percent of Nigerian rape coverage reinforces victim-blaming myths, often burying stories on inside pages. When male survivors are mentioned, the language shifts from accountability to moral panic.
“Shame is contagious,” Iheme added. “One person feels shame about something, you can make another person feel ashamed about that, and just like that, it continues to propagate the same way. So in the culture of men, there is no space for them to speak up about their pain, and when they do speak up, they are ridiculed and told that’s not being a man.”
Nigeria’s Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act of 2015 criminalizes rape of all genders, yet Lagos State has not fully adopted it. A 2023 World Federation for Democracy report found that police and courts across 12 states in Nigeria regarding the act’s provisions forced survivors into costly, stigmatizing prosecutions.
While Lagos has no shelters for adult men who are survivors, the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency has launched initiatives like the King’s Club, a plan by the DSVA aimed at promoting positive masculinity and combating sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), in schools. Oni urged survivors to report directly to the agency first, saying, “I would inform the public to make that kind of report at the agency first, so that we can provide all the necessary support from the beginning to the end.”
With an idea of what potentially faced him, *Emeka and the two boys who shared their stories anonymously never took their ordeal to the police. Instead, they buried it, following the all-too-familiar script for male survivors that Iheme, the clinical psychologist, describes: “A man is supposed to get over it. You’re supposed to move on. You’re supposed to be fine. Those expectations leave little room for a boy’s pain.”
* Authors’ note: The names of students and the perpetrator involved in the sexual abuse case described in the opening paragraphs of this article were omitted to protect the survivors and to encourage more students to come forward. It is our hope that this will give you strength.
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from Journalists for Transparency. **You can also find this article on 100 Reporters by clicking **here.