Written by Ifeoluwa Suleiman
My mother had a dream that I would get pregnant by a man far older than me. She never told me about the dream. She just started treating me like it had already happened.
It happened right before I travelled out for my NYSC service. She never asked if I was seeing anyone. She never asked me anything. Instead of a conversation, I got a thirty-minute lecture that scared me half to death. That’s how sex entered our house. Not as a subject, but as a suspicion – an assumption that I would trade my body for an older man just to survive somewhere unfamiliar. There was no conversation, no context, just a sudden tightening. “If you allow any man to do this or that, you will regret it for the rest of your life,” she said. Not as part of a real dialogue, not a question, and not “do you have someone?” asked from a place of wanting to understand. Just a warning, built around a fear she never actually explained. Sex simply wasn’t discussed. Not the mechanics of it, not the danger of it, not the choice in it. Just silence, wrapped tight around a warning that I was somehow already guilty of something I hadn’t done yet.
I found out later, much later, what that silence actually costs.
In secondary school, I got sick, and a male friend, my closest friend at the time, came to check on me. That was the whole story. A friend, worried, showed up. When my father found out, he didn’t ask what happened. He got angry. He called me easy prey. He said things about the kind of girl who lets a boy come see her. I remember being confused more than anything. I was just a girl who was glad her friend had come. I didn’t have the language to defend myself, because nobody had ever given me the language to understand what was happening to me, or in me, or around me. I only understood, in that moment, that I had done something wrong. I still don’t fully know what.
This is the part of the story that doesn’t get told enough. The silence wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t just an absence. It was actively teaching me something. My body was a liability to manage. Any attention toward it was my doing. The correct response to confusion was shame, not a question.
A recent wave of conversation online asked something simple. Did all the discipline our parents used actually work? Did it raise us into people who behave like we were well raised? The replies were the interesting part. Not defences of the beatings, but confessions. One user described a woman she knew who was so hard on her own daughter that she once beat the girl with a broom at eight years old for not sweeping the room “well enough”, yelling her name like a curse every time. Decades later, that daughter is in her thirties and still can’t stand her mother. Other users described the same shape in different rooms. Children, locked indoors to keep the world out, isolated from friends, and disciplined through fear instead of explanation. One said it left them never really knowing happiness until it was too late to enjoy it. Another admitted her first instinct with her own children is still to spank before she thinks and that she’s had to learn, in her thirties, how to unlearn that reflex so she doesn’t become the parent she resented. People saying it made them fearful. Spineless. Willing to accept small abuses because they’d been trained to think that was normal. Nobody in those threads was really talking about sex. But they were describing the exact same mechanism: control instead of conversation, force instead of explanation. And that mechanism doesn’t stop at discipline. It’s the same one that decided sex was something to manage in us, not something to teach us.
Research on Nigerian households backs this up plainly. Even in homes where parents do talk about sex, the conversation usually frames it as dangerous territory to be controlled, not information to be given (Izugbara), which leaves young people without the tools to actually own their own sexuality as adults. A 2025 study of parents in rural Nigeria found that same hesitance still holding, shaped heavily by ethnicity, religion, and cultural belief. That’s the quiet, unglamorous root of a much louder problem. A 2023 study of young women at a Nigerian university found that 39.5% had experienced some form of sexual violence, but only 3.3% ever reported it to the police. Nearly 46,000 sexual violence complaints were logged by the National Human Rights Commission in 2024 alone, and researchers are clear that’s only the visible fraction. Stigma and victim-blaming push survivors toward isolating themselves, blaming themselves, and avoiding help altogether. That’s not survivors inventing a new way to cope. That’s the same silence they were raised on, reappearing at the worst possible moment, doing exactly what it was trained to do.
As a young lecturer in a College of Education, I watch this play out every semester in different students. Even a simple question in class can be met with silence, because somewhere along the line, they were conditioned to listen, not question, and to believe, even when they don’t agree.
This semester it was a student named Grace. She showed up faithfully the first semester. By the second, she’d stopped coming to class entirely – no explanation, no call. Whenever I asked her coursemates, I got the same vague answer. She has the general class; she’s just not available. I finally caught her at a compulsory departmental activity and asked her directly why she’d disappeared. She told me her coursemates had been mocking her with jokes, the kind that leave a mark anyway. I asked if she’d told them to stop. She said yes. It didn’t matter.
To someone else, that might not sound like reason enough to vanish. But I recognised it instantly, because I know what it costs to not be believed. I know what it feels like to be asked a question and not actually be listened to, where the answer expected of you is silence, because anything other than agreeing makes you look like you’re lying. I stepped in as her teacher, the way I wish someone had stepped in for me. She’s been showing up ever since. Now, if she can’t make it, she calls ahead.
I think about this now, too. It’s easy to still repeat the pattern even while trying to break it. I’ve caught myself doing it: responding before I ask, correcting instead of understanding, and repeating my mother’s tune with newer words. It’s humbling to realise that knowing better doesn’t automatically mean doing better. That you can be actively unlearning something and still catch it slipping out of your own mouth in a classroom.
So I don’t think the answer is simply “talk to your kids about sex”, as if one conversation undoes a lifetime of silence. The answer, I think, is closer to this. Challenge the norm before you enforce it. Ask a question to understand before you respond to control. Give a balanced picture, not just the danger but also the pleasure, the choice, and the ordinary humanity of it, instead of handing down fear dressed up as protection.
Reclaiming pleasure has been its own kind of adventure. The first time I clearly stated what I wanted during intimacy, it felt terrifying, my heart racing, fully exposed. But being heard, being honoured in that moment, brought a rush of connection and joy I hadn’t let myself have before. Moments like that, slow and unglamorous as they are, are where the old inheritance actually starts to break.
And even that comes with its own risk. My generation is learning to speak up where our parents went silent, but we’re doing it while still standing inside the same fog we’re trying to clear. If we’re not careful, we’ll just be teaching the next generation through a different set of skewed lenses, better-sounding, maybe, but no less shaped by everything we never fully worked through ourselves.
Still, the broom doesn’t get the final word. Neither does the lock. What comes after them is slower and far less certain, but it’s ours to write.
I’m nearly thirty, and I’m still, honestly, discovering what actually pleases me. I don’t say that as a confession. I say it because it’s the truest measure of what that silence cost, not just what it took from me as a girl but how long the bill keeps coming as a woman. It’s also, slowly, what freedom is starting to feel like. What comes after the silence is slower and less certain, but it is ours to write.
