Eight Hundred Questions: Sexual Violence Awareness in Secondary Schools

The target was 750 students in 15 schools. What came back instead was 2,357 students, 21 trained peer advocates, four disclosures — and more than eight hundred questions.

Context

In 2016, Nigeria was living with a crisis that few institutions were willing to name directly in secondary schools. Sexual violence — against girls, against boys, by peers, by teachers, by family members, by people in positions of trust — was present in the lives of young people in ways the educational system was not equipped to address. School counselling units existed but were places students actively avoided for fear of stigma. Many young people had no framework for recognising that what they were experiencing was wrong, no language for what had happened to them, and no reliable pathway to seek help.

The Initiative for Sustaining Family Unity, with support from AmplifyChange channelled through the African Women’s Development Fund, set out to change that — not in theory, but in classrooms and school halls, with real students asking real questions about their real lives.

The project ran from February to October 2016. It was called the Sexual Violence Awareness (SVA) project. Its target was 750 students across 15 schools in Lagos and Ogun States. What actually happened exceeded that target in almost every measure.

What We Did

The project was built on five interconnected activities, each designed to work together rather than in isolation.

• Development of training materials. IforSFU researched, drafted, tested, and validated a Student’s Handbook on Human Rights and Sexual Violence for the Nigerian secondary school context. The materials were tested with participants before final printing, ensuring the content was accessible, relevant, and accurate to the issues students were actually facing.
• Awareness sessions in schools. Interactive sessions on basic human rights, the nature and forms of sexual violence, practical self-defence, and reporting pathways. Sessions were participatory by design — students were not lectured; they were invited to ask, discuss, challenge, and think about their own situations and responsibilities.
• Identification and training of SVA Champions. Students who showed particular interest and potential were invited to become Sexual Violence Awareness Champions: trained peer advocates carrying the conversation beyond the sessions and into their school communities.
• A quarterly student newsletter. Two editions of the Students’ Speak Newsletter were produced and distributed, covering topics including “Sexual Abuse by Acquaintance: Is it My Fault?”
• Reporting channels. IforSFU researched and established secure channels for students to report abuse, recognising that in-school counselling units were not serving that function for the students who most needed them.

The initial plan was to work in government-owned schools in Lagos State. When the Lagos State Education Board process proved too slow — taking months to yield approvals the project timeline could not accommodate — IforSFU made a pragmatic decision: approach private and missionary schools directly. Heads of these schools responded quickly and positively. The work went ahead.

Who We Reached

The original project target was 750 students. By the end of the reporting period, 1,822 students had been reached across 11 schools — and by project completion, the total had grown to 2,357. The project exceeded its target by more than three times.

Of the students reached in the progress reporting period, 575 were male and 1,247 were female. Both boys and girls participated fully — and both disclosed experiences of sexual violence. The data confirmed something important: sexual violence is not only a girls’ issue. Boys experience it, are affected by it, and need the same frameworks for recognition, response, and reporting.

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Twenty-one students were identified as SVA Champions — young people who showed particular commitment to the cause. Eighteen of the twenty proposed champions completed their training — 90% of the milestone target. Of the 1,000 handbooks printed, over 950 were distributed, requiring IforSFU to work with schools to manage distribution carefully so that no school ran out before the project completed.

The Questions Students Asked

Over the course of 11 schools and hundreds of sessions, students submitted more than 800 questions. The volume alone told a story — these were young people who had been waiting for a space to ask. A selection, drawn directly from the record:

These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions of young people navigating real situations — often situations that were happening to them or to people they knew. The sessions created the first safe space many of these students had ever had to ask them.

Cases That Emerged

Four cases of abuse were disclosed and documented during the project. Three involved abuse by stepfathers or cousins. One student wanted the case against her cousin dismissed; one wanted her abuser prosecuted. All were handled with care — counselling was provided where accepted, and referrals were made where appropriate.

These cases were not anomalies. They were exactly what the project design had anticipated — that creating a safe space for conversation would allow disclosures that had previously had nowhere to go. The question was always whether the organisation would be ready to receive them. IforSFU was.

What Worked

The participatory design of the sessions. Students were not passive recipients of information — they were active participants who interrogated the material, challenged assumptions, and brought their own experiences into the room. This design generated the 800+ questions. It also generated the disclosures.

The decision to pivot to private and missionary schools when the government approval process stalled. It was a judgment call that preserved the project timeline and allowed the work to proceed. The schools approached responded positively and became genuine partners — many asked for the programme to continue after the project ended.

The student champion model. Identifying 21 peer advocates and training them meant the project did not end when the IforSFU team left the school. The champions carried the conversation forward within their communities, beyond the reach of any single project.

What Was Harder

Sustaining the work beyond a single set of sessions. Every school visited made the same observation: one engagement only scratches the surface. The issues are live, the need for conversation is ongoing, and the relationships of trust that allow students to open up take time to build. A project with a defined end date cannot fully address that.

The government school approval process. The delays experienced with the Lagos State Education Board were significant and redirected the project from its original target cohort. This is a systemic challenge that extends well beyond IforSFU — accessing government schools for sensitive social development programming requires sustained advocacy at the policy level, not just project-level permissions.

The complexity of the cases that emerged. Some students disclosed abuse but did not want formal action taken. Respecting that decision — while maintaining a duty of care — required careful, experienced judgement at every step.

What We Learned

The single most important learning from this project was also the most sobering: a significant number of young people are experiencing sexual violence, and have been experiencing it for long enough that they have developed frameworks for normalising it. They did not know that what was happening to them was wrong. They did not know that sitting on an uncle’s lap could be a form of grooming. They did not know that a teacher giving secret gifts was a warning sign.

Information, placed directly in young people’s hands in a language and format they can receive, changes that. Not immediately. Not completely. But it provides a foundation that can be built upon — and that is precisely what sustained engagement is for.

The project also confirmed that gender-based violence in schools is not gendered in the way often assumed. Boys disclosed abuse at the same rate of emotional response as girls. Both needed the same frameworks. Programming that centres only girls misses half the picture.

Finally, the newsletter proved its value. Students kept them. They shared them. They brought them home. A piece of print a student can carry beyond the session is a different kind of resource from a lesson delivered in a classroom — it travels with the person into contexts the programme can never directly reach.

The Thread to Today

The SVA project of 2016 planted seeds across two Nigerian states that are still growing. The twenty-one champions trained in those secondary schools are now adults — some of them, most likely, in positions where they are shaping how the people around them understand and respond to gender-based violence.

More directly, the work shapes everything Sheerah Verenda does today. The Justice Access Hub carries forward the case referral and legal support work IforSFU was doing with the four disclosed cases. Verenda Wellness carries forward the counselling support offered to students who disclosed. The education and youth development strand — including the Education Support Initiative — reflects the conviction, confirmed repeatedly during this project, that secondary school is one of the most important and underserved spaces for social development work.

The question a student asked in a Lagos Island school in 2016 — “If someone is abused and was threatened, how do you expect them to report when their life is in danger?” — does not yet have a complete answer. But Sheerah Verenda is still working on it.

The schools kept asking us to come back. They said their students needed more than one conversation. That told us everything we needed to know about both the depth of the need and the inadequacy of a single project to address it. It shaped how we think about sustained community engagement to this day.

Kate Ijeoma Ibeanusi — Founder & Executive Director