Beauty is never in exposure

In Nigeria, there have been attempts by our lawmakers and some individuals to regulate dressing in public. Indeed, a bill on indecent dressing was sponsored by Senator Eme Ufot Ekaette, then chairperson of Senate Committee Women and Youth, in 2009. The bill, which later came to be known as the nudity bill, was to “address issues of indecency and immorality and preserve cultural norms and values,” Ekaette said.

But the senator’s move was heavily criticized by some groups, among which is the Nigerian Feminists Forum, who accused her of trivialising women’s concerns and issues. However, a look at the way people, especially women, dress these days is very alarming. Nudity in our society has become very rampant to the extent that some of our young ladies enjoy dressing half naked.

Mallam Aminu Ahmed, a teacher with Government Secondary School Karu, Abuja, blames the trend on parents. “The problem starts from the home. Some mothers think their children will be seen as civilized by imitating western culture and their way of dressing. Many mothers allow their girl child to get exposed to hilarious magazines or indecent movies where they copy so-called styles from celebrities. They fail to realize that they are destroying the life of their children that way.”

Though the society share a part of the blame for the moral decay we see on display, many still hold mothers responsible for the negative attitude. “Mothers are really the ones to blame for this societal ill. The way some of them dress means that they cannot admonish their children to do what is right. They forget that it is what the child learns from home that they take on with them to the outside world,” says Ahmed Ibrahim, an Abuja based Islamic scholar.

Ibrahim added that “Though indecent dressing can also be copied due to peer pressure, it still remains the responsibility of parents to try to keep an eye on the type of people their children associate with. This is because it is very easy for children to copy some things just because they see their friends doing it.”

For Hajiya Rakiya Ismail, a public relations officer in Abuja, “Parental negligence is greatly to blame as most parents abandon the responsibility of raising their children to television sets. Such children learn almost everything from television and tend to act out what they see on television. Parents, especially mothers, should be alive to their responsibility and serve as worthy role models for their kids who look up to them for guidance.”

Indeed, the idea of being modest has to be taught early in a child’s life. You should think of where your child would be in six years time and what you would want your child to hold on to very importantly. Trying to discipline a teenager has limited impact on behavioral change, because by the time children reach their teenage years, if they have not internalized why it is important to dress modestly and make education a priority amongst other worldly things, then there is little that can be done to slow down the train of immorality.

There are certain facts that people fail to understand and that is if a young girl dresses seductively, she would attract men who will treat her as if she wants to be seduced. She will only succeed in getting the attention of lustful and deceitful men and not humble and gentle ones. There are two valuable principles that we tell people about ourselves by the way we dress, and they are: 1. You teach people how to treat you. 2. Whatever bait you use determines the type of fish you catch. This, in essence, means that if you dress indecently to attract a husband, you will definitely get an indecent and irresponsible one.

The way we dress says a lot about us. You can not appear like a whore and expect to be treated as a responsible human being. According to Adeyemi Adelegan, a newspaper reader, the proposed bill regarding indecent dressing in the Senate should be pursued to a logical conclusion. He said “those who may want to vote down this bill as an infringement of people’s fundamental human rights should also remember that too much freedom could sometimes become a burden to an individual as well as the society.”

Some people are of the belief that there is no way to control indecent dressing in our society today. But this is not true, if the conducts of our teenage girls are not checked it would lead to prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases and other social vices and this could bring about untold hardship to the nation as a whole.

Mrs. Onyechere, the Imo State Coordinator of Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF), in a recent interview, said she was not in support of indecent dressing and went on to blame men who appreciate girls who dress indecently. She stressed that if parents do their work adequately, the kids will have no cause to dress indecently.

In the changing world that we have today only positive aspects of liberalization and globalization should be tolerated and encouraged. Imitating western culture wholesale should be discouraged and we should start looking inwards and even promote our own culture that is decent and worth exporting to the outside world. Fashion is okay but it should never be a licence to go about naked.