She said her mother took in a male relative when she was about five years old.

The relative came in from her mother’s side of the family, and he was about sixteen years old.

She said her grandmother was also living with them at the time due to her frail health.

The young man was going to school from their house and was also helping her mother and grandmother out with house chores.

She said she couldn’t remember clearly, but somehow this young man would trick her into playing sexual games with her, and one day she remembered that when she was urinating, she urinated semen.

She said her grandmother was the first to notice that she had been defiled.

Her grandmother told her mother what had happened, and her mother quietly sent the relative away.

She said they never took in another relative or employed a house help after that, despite her father insisting that her mother and grandmother needed the help.

She knew it was because of what happened and felt her mother and grandmother were just protecting her from evil.

Years went by, and she gained admission into the university.

After her first semester at the university, she returned home for the Christmas holidays, and her father began to ask her strange questions.

Did you have sex with anybody?

Did any boy touch you?

Are you still intact?

Are you still a virgin?

She said she would ignore him whenever he brought up the topic.

Which daughter is comfortable discussing such things with her father?

Of course, she had not been sexually active in any way because nobody had bothered to ask her out or show her that kind of attention, but how was it her father’s business?

She said she was shocked when her father declared that he would be taking her to the hospital to do a virginity test just after the New Year celebrations.

They had just finished their family prayer that morning, and her mother, her father and her two younger sisters were there

Her grandmother had died some years before then.

She said her mother kept quiet.

Not a whimper, not a word of protest, not a word in her defence

Just silence.

She said she couldn’t believe it.

Her mother knew the truth, and her mother kept quiet.

She said her father drove her to a hospital, and she went in to see the doctor.

When her father told the doctor what he wanted, the doctor told her father it was a terrible idea.

The doctor told her father that it would affect her emotionally and psychologically and could damage her sexuality.

The doctor was a god-sent.

He was able to dissuade her father from his quest to establish if she was a virgin or not.

She said she never could see her mother the same way after the incident.

Her mother’s silence was a sin.

PS: As parents, we have to do better when it comes to how we raise our children.

If we cannot defend them when we ought to, it counts heavily against us in their eyes.

If we know the truth and somehow conspire to hide it to save our own faces, the children note this too.

She was sure her mother did not want her father to know that her nephew defiled his daughter.

It would seriously cause a bad rift in the family.

Her mother’s silence when her father demanded a virginity test was, however, very wrong, as it felt like her mother threw her under the bus or was hoping that she was already having sex as an undergraduate and needed to be exposed.

Either way, it was not right

-GSW-