Social media has become prominent part of life for many young women today. It is gaining popularity everyday by day. Most young women engage with social media without thinking what the negative effect are on their lives, whether positive or negative.
The young women are now becoming more concerned with facebook friends than the people; they interact with face to face in their daily lives.
In recent years, criminals who invade and negatively use the opportunities offered by the internet seem to be removing smiles off faces of many Nigerian women. Social media are form of high interactivity used to perpetuate violence against women.
Violence against women though facebook manifests in many forms ranging from the use of words, photographs physical injury to the death.
The United Nations’ declaration on the elimination of violence against women (1993) by Fagbemi (200:1) described violence against women thus: “Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical sexual or psychological suffering to women including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty whether occurring in public or private life.
The above description by the United Nations clearly shows that violence against women manifest in many forms. In most developing nations especially Nigeria, violence against women, usually occur in forms such as wife battering, marital rape, force pregnancy, sexual harassment in work place, slapping, kicking, hitting with an object, calling of names and harmful traditional practice like premature marriages, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) etc are form through which violence against women used to be executed. But today, with the advent of social networking sites like facebook, twitter, 2go, Blackberry phones etc the story has changed. Violence against women is no longer only face to face basis, the social media forms are being used to perpetuate violence against women.
It is also painful to note the rising trends with which women are brutalized and killed by men who at one point in time have been intimate with them is becoming alarming.
Social media has eaten into the marrow of some women to the extent that there is no cordial relationship/interaction between their husbands, the men they saw has taken over the affairs of their hearts.
Homes are no longer what it uses to be because of social media, the man accusing the wife of committing adultery with men she met on the net. And in some cases social media has made it difficult for the husbands to wayward because of constantly seeing of pictures of their ex-date.
Some women went as far as condemning themselves when they see that they are not as beautiful as those seen on the net.
Wastage of time seems to be one of the worse negative effects of social media on women. Some women spend a lot of time to sit on the computer than giving time to do some reasonable things.
Young women that are students have lesser time for their studies because of social media. ###
EDITH NSE FRIDAY
08025293937
fridaynse@yahoo.com
