Harassment at market centres has grown to become one of the foremost perils to the safety of the womenfolk in public spaces. Women are twice as vulnerable as male counterparts to verbal and physical intimidations from entitled men. But a group of women have come under the umbrella of #MarketMarch to fight the seemingly accepted misconduct. Will the remonstration leave an enduring impact? TEMITAYO AYETOTO reports after a visit to Yaba Market, Lagos.
Sheltering wallets and mobile gadgets, adjusting hand baggage for easy glimpse and tuning one’s sensitivity to a highly conscious degree like a soldier equipped for war are not some of the things women zealously want to do while shopping at open market squares. But it’s the safest thing to do in this unique situation.
Precautionary as the measures are, they cannot buy women freedom of harassment from the prowling hands of ‘Lagos hustlers’. They have their trademark as ‘we must touch’ – that is, any potential female customer walking through the market with or without the intent to buy should at least be jabbed for attention.
READ ALSO: Lagos shuts Yaba/Jibowu axis for rail project
In the sacred laws of hustlers in Yaba, an epicentre infamous for harassment of women for instance, it is a crime against the hustle to make money when women resist being led to stores by coarse palms. It is also a misconduct for a lady not to give an affirmative response, when asked whether she needs either a second-hand or new pair of trousers, tops, shoes or bags. But Mary Sharon, a National Youth Service Corp member from Abia state flouted the law and earned the denigrating consequences of so doing.
“I had a really horrible experience,” she said young lady. “People were dragging me from left to right trying to interfere in what I want to buy.”
She had alighted from a bus coming from Maryland at the Yaba bus-stop adjacent Jibowu bus-stop, aiming to buy a good pair of shoes and a nice Denim shirt to keep her white T-shirt immaculate through her journey to Obalende where her community development service was based. Sharon was certain she could get relative quality at an affordable rate at Yaba. But as she got off the bus, she was immediately swarmed by a group of men with various offerings. In her sudden entourage were dealers in clothing items, curtain materials and foreign currencies. Unyielding Sharon knew better than to concede to being spoon-fed and focused on locating a proper clothing outlet. This sparked the ire of her predators and they gave her a verbal beating.
“These are people that will want to hike prices and take you to a shop where they will pretend to be the owner and increase the price and make much profit out of it not even minding whether you have the money or not. There were many of them who came at me. The situation is over everywhere in Lagos but I believe it’s too much here and terrible,” Sharon groaned after a heated exchange of insults with the hustlers she had just disappointed.
Her experience could be described as a subtle form of the typical nature of harassment suffered by females in the market. Worse cases do play out in instances where teenage girls, ladies and in fact women get assaulted and embarrassed in the hustlers’ bid to coerce them into buying. Consequently, young ladies especially find it terrifying visiting markets like Yaba. It is not that attempts are not made at luring young boys or men into buying, but hardly are they harassed for resisting.
A week before Sharon’s ordeal, Damilola Marcus, founder of #MarketMarch, organised a protest at the heart of Yaba market to end what has been perceived as an acceptable harassment and bullying of women. The protest was tagged ‘MarketMarch’ with the aim of raising a red flag against the perception that harassment was normal and that women must embrace it without objections. With placards reading ‘No be by Force to Buy’, ‘Stop Touching us’, ‘We are against Street Harassment’, ‘Not your Colour’ among other lines, the protesters marched through an army of hustlers who were equally jeering, pelting and screaming back at them ‘we must touch.’
According to a tweet by @MarketMarch, “They threw water at us and called us prostitutes, sluts (ashawo). They said it was our fault that we got harassed. They claimed it was because of our clothing and asked us to stay home if we didn’t want to be harassed. They tried to shame us because they were ashamed.”
Most of the hustlers apparently found it audacious for a group of women to get escorted by the Police to challenge their actions. Even with the presence of the police, the hustlers promised never to stop.
Marcus believes that a very strong sense of entitlement mainly fuels this kind of harassment and the expression of that entitlement depends on how ingrained it is in whoever is encountered.
Many Nigerian feminists, she explains, unite over the fact that passing through most of the major markets in the cities has been a traumatising experience right from their childhood and remains part of their adulthood. It is something to expect and get up in arms with.
“I decided that something needed to be done about it and every citizen has a right to protest. They really do not believe that we should resist them touching us. There is a very strong sense of entitlement. In any way possible that you can think of, they will express it,” Marcus said.
However for majority of the hustlers, harassment in the language of the protesters is just an aggressive strategy for marketing and increasing sales for their proprietors. The role of hustlers’ services to most shop owners within Yaba market could be compared to the importance of oxygen to man. Because some of these shops are located in hidden corners, traders depend a lot on hustlers to drive sales and hustlers massively leverage the opportunity to pad price and fatten their reward. Hence, being in the face of a potential customer and deploying whichever means possible to convince him or her to buy is key to the survival of their personal economies.
Although some of the hustlers who spoke with BusinessDay berated the culture of harassment, they also built a defence around the excuse that most of them were desperate unemployed youths looking to make ends meet. Among them are secondary school dropouts, vocationally trained, hinterland arrivals seeking greener pastures in Lagos and some deportees. With unstable accommodation plans, many live from day to day, uncertain about how the next day will unfold. Consequently, every customer they are able to convince counts.
“It is not everyone here that knows how to approach a customer. Some are touts or illiterates. It is not until you touch the person before they will follow you,” explained Frank a 32-year-old hustler.
He for instance was deported from Dubai in 2015 for having hard drugs in his possession. At 10, he lost his father and was thrust into adulthood at a much tender age. His father bequeathed some landed property which Frank and his siblings couldn’t take charge of because of their age. In his quest to arrive early at being financially comfortable, he joined a friend in Dubai in 2010. There, he was introduced to ‘Yahoo Yahoo’, an internet fraud venture for youths inclined to amassing wealth quick. Unfortunately for him, he fell out of favour with his friend by failing to oblige him the lion share of a successful deal he struck. Frank was almost assassinated before getting deported.
“He set me up and wanted to kill me. It was a Lebanese lady that saved me by hiding me in her room. He sent some assassins after me. They planted cocaine in my bag and called the police. I was arrested and deported. That was how I founded myself back here in Yaba. I sold all my property and nothing was left,” he explained.
Frank, who now appears to see the sense in toeing a legitimate path currently hustles on the streets of Yaba market with pencil shaped jeans trousers neatly arranged on his arms. He hopes to raise enough funds to rent an apartment of his and move out of his friend’s place. According to him, he is only trying to bridge the gap between customers and sellers in Tejuosho market while making his ends meet.
In spite of the protest, Samuel Ogbonna’s perspective to the matter remains that customers must be coerced for their attention. “You must force them before they will know you are talking. You must talk to the person more than five or six times before they will agree to buy what you are selling,” he uttered in defence.
The Imo state indigene is an equally frustrated man, apprehensive of being condemned to the pangs of poverty. In his 20 years’ stay in Lagos, he has migrated from selling motorcycle spare parts to selling ladies’ wears, phones and phone accessories at Computer Village Ikeja before settling with sewing and fixing of curtain and bed-sheet materials.
He became a full-time hustler after his small shop was demolished by the Lagos state government to give way to the construction of the Yaba Bus Terminal. And since curtain and bed sheets are not daily needs, he would have to poke at least 10 potential customers to arrive at a real buyer.
“We have to find the customers because when you wait in the shop, they might not locate you there. When we find one or two, we take them to our shop. If it is wears, one might have five to 10 customers a day but for curtain, you might come a day and you won’t see any customer. If I see one, I’ll thank God,” Ogbonna explained.
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women defines harassment as any inappropriate conduct that might reasonably be expected or perceived to cause offence or humiliation to another person. It may take the form of words, gestures or actions which tend to annoy, alarm, abuse, demean, intimidate, belittle, humiliate or embarrass another.
The alarming rate of the menace around the world and particularly in developing countries topped the list of concerns for UN executives three years ago when they converged to discuss improving access to public spaces and making them safe for women and girls under the theme “Public Spaces for All.”
The organisation established that although violence against women in the private domain had become widely recognised as a human rights violation, the scourge, especially sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces, remains a largely neglected issue with few laws or policies to tame it.
Revelations from UN Women study show that women in urban areas are twice as likely as men to experience violence, especially in developing countries. Twenty-five to 100 percent of women and girls around the world have experienced some form of sexual violence in public spaces in their lifetime and according to a similar Gallup data from surveys in 143 countries, men are more likely than women to assert that they feel safe walking alone at night in their communities.
The case made by Lakshmi Puri, the former deputy executive director, UN Women was that freedom of harassment in public spaces is pivotal to fostering gender equality. Hence, continuance of such violence limits women and girls’ movement, participation in education, access to essential services, and negatively impacts their health and well-being.
Impact of poor legal support
Out of 667 cases of abuse recorded between July to September by the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team (DSVRT), none of them came from any market squares. Owing to the fact that harassment is perceived as a usual challenge that must be put up with, many victims do not think it merits being reported to authorities. They simply live with it and move on.
Sexual harassment in most modern legal context is branded illegal but those laws hardly prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or minor isolated incidents. The nearest to punitive measure and most effective law in the country is section 262 of the Criminal Law of Lagos state. It regards sexual harassment as a felony capable of attracting 3 years imprisonment. But the questions haunting the minds of an average female shopper is what manner of justice could accompany such suffering.
Titilola Vivour-Adeniyi, the coordinator DSVRT hopes to bring an end to the menace through further collaborations with market leaders, traders and hustlers, as she believes they remain key stakeholders to the issue. Acknowledging that existing law needs to come alive in sheltering potential victims, she emphasised it was important for people to be proactive at ensuring those cases were reported. “We have not handled any market harassment case. What we are doing is that we have been embarking on market sensitisation since 2016. We have been to the markets not just on sexual harassment but on sexual and gender based violence in its entirety. It is not when they get to the market that they suddenly wake up to the reality that they are entitled. It is an ingrained issue and it is just that the market is one of the places that they manifest such animalistic behaviours. It is still at the heart of gender inequality and sexual- and gender-based violence,” Vivour-Adeniyi
Prince Ani, the chairman of Middlemen Tejuosho Market Phase II also expressed willingness to support efforts to curb harassment within the shopping mall, saying his leadership has decided to have meetings to orientate hustlers on how to approach customers. Although his jurisdiction only covers affairs within the Tejuosho Ultramodern Shopping Centre, he pledged to ensure that the environment will become safer for womenfolk to visit. “I’m condemning this because we are trying to regulate the market, so that we will know who brought you into the mall and the particular shop you are hustling for. At least one person should talk to a customer at a time so that the customer can grant you audience. It is not by force that anybody that comes into the mall should buy,” Ani said.
