Nigeria’s justice system fails juveniles
On a sunny afternoon in August 2020, 13-year-old Omar Farouq stood before a Sharia court in Kano State, accused of blasphemy. Too young to understand the gravity of the charges, he listened in disbelief as the judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
Omar’s ordeal began after a heated argument with a friend, during which they exchanged insults. Soon after, police officers summoned him, and he was charged with blasphemy. When the case became public, an angry mob attacked his home, forcing his mother to flee to a neighbouring village.
Nigeria’s Child Rights Act (CRA), enacted in 2003, was meant to prevent such treatment of children. The law domesticates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and prohibits practices such as child marriage and exploitative child labour.
Section 221 (1) of the CRA guarantees restriction of punishment for children by prescribing that no child shall be ordered to be (a) imprisoned or (b) subjected to corporal punishment or (c ) subjected to the death penalty or have the death penalty recorded against them.
However, implementation of the Act has been uneven despite that 35 of Nigeria’s 36 states have domesticated the law.
Section 204 of the CRA states that children are to be dealt with only within a dedicated child justice system, not the adult criminal justice system.
The section states that “No child shall be subjected to the criminal justice process or to criminal sanctions, but a child alleged to have committed an act which would constitute a criminal offence if he were an adult shall be subjected only to the child justice system and processes set out in this Act.”
This means a child who allegedly commits an act that would be a criminal offense for an adult will not face criminal charges or sanctions but will instead be subjected to a child-focused system designed for their rehabilitation, correction, and reintegration into society.
But in practice, children are routinely arrested, detained, and tried as adults. Some, as young as 10, are accused of theft or even murder, and subjected to the same harsh procedures as adults, sometimes without legal representation, fair hearings, or referral to juvenile courts as required by law.
A joint study conducted by the Nigerian government, UNICEF, and the European Union between 2018 and 2022 confirmed these violations. The research examined the conditions, treatment, and experiences of children and young adults in correctional facilities nationwide.
The study drew on physical data from 87 adult custodial centres and three borstal institutions, primary data from 22 remand homes, and interviews with 1,279 children and young adults in detention. It also included perspectives from law enforcement officials and judicial authorities.
Findings from the remand homes revealed that stealing and robbery were the most common offences. Across 17 states, 2,165 children, representing 47 per cent of those in remand facilities, were accused of stealing or theft. Other charges included rape (2.8 per cent), cultism and homicide (4.5 per cent), and murder. Some children were also detained for protection purposes, or because they were accused of wandering, trespassing, or being beyond parental control.
At the time, the study showed that 133,906 children and young adults were in detention facilities around the country. For many of these children, detention meant exposure to physical abuse, overcrowding, and long-lasting psychological trauma.
Omar, now 18, was eventually acquitted by the Kano State High Court in January 2021, five months after his sentencing. During his detention, he was held in a cell, a condition that rights activists described as a violation of his fundamental rights. His case drew condemnation from UNICEF, but countless others remain unheard.
Segun Olowookere’s ordeal was even more disturbing. In 2010, at just 17, he was sentenced to death by the Osun State High Court for stealing hens and eggs. He spent more than a decade in Kirikiri Prison, including years on death row, before finally regaining his freedom in December 2024 following an appeal court ruling.
Although international law prohibits capital punishment for offences committed by minors, the Osun judiciary defended the ruling, arguing that Mr Olowookere and his co-defendant, Sunday Morakinyo, had a history of armed robbery.
Mr Olowookere, now 31, in an interview with News Central’s Breakfast Xtra in January, described how police officers beat him so severely that he thought he would not survive.
“That was how they started beating both of us mercilessly, accusing us of lying and not telling the truth. The police began beating us so severely that I thought I might not survive. It was only by God’s grace that my life was spared. I was 17 years old then. My second, Morakinyo, was already bleeding from the nose, his ear, and anus in the police cell to the extent that I had to clean it up. The beating was because they wanted him to attest to the boys’ claim,” he said.
Arrested like adults, charged without counsel
Omar and Mr Olowookere’s stories are not unique. Many children across Nigeria endure similar fates; their cases are only unknown to the public.
In November 2024, dozens of minors were arrested during nationwide protests in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, and in Lagos, the country’s commercial hub. At least 76 people, including 30 minors, were charged with treason, an offence that carries the death penalty, after participating in demonstrations against worsening economic hardship.
The arraignment of the minors generated public outrage and drew global condemnation, especially after they were paraded before the media. Some of the children fainted in court, having spent weeks in detention without proper care, access to their families, or legal representation.
The abuse does not end in courtrooms. In August 2025, the Nigerian Correctional Service admitted that children were being kept in adult custodial centres because many state-run juvenile facilities had either collapsed or never existed. This means that a teenager remanded for a petty offence could end up sharing a cell with hardened criminals.
A bitter example dates to 2017, when the then Chief Judge of Lagos State, Oluwafunmilayo Atilade, visited Badagry Prison. She found that more than 100 children were locked up in cells alongside adults convicted of murder, armed robbery, and other violent crimes.
The children, aged between 12 and 17, had mainly been arrested by the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental Sanitation and Special Offences. Their charges ranged from breaching public peace to street hawking. Special courts summarily convicted many.
Keeping children in the same facilities as adults not only violates international human rights standards but also exposes them to immediate dangers, physical and sexual abuse, criminal indoctrination, and a high risk of disease in overcrowded and poorly maintained cells.
Following the Lagos chief judge’s intervention, 80 of the children were released. Fourteen of them were found to have been wrongfully detained and should never have been imprisoned in the first place.
The problem, however, is far from new. As early as 2009, a study revealed that about 200 children were being held among 2,400 adult inmates in Port Harcourt Prison, south-south Nigeria.
With the Nigerian Correctional Service recently admitting that children are still confined in adult custodial centres, little has changed. The persistence of this practice, stretching from at least 2009 to the present day, shows several years of violations of children’s rights within Nigeria’s justice system.
Such accounts reveal a broken system where minors are subjected to wrongful imprisonment, and, in extreme cases, even the threat of execution.
A Consultant Psychiatrist and Public Health Epidemiology trainee, Yesiru Kareem, told PREMIUM TIMES that detaining children in adult custodial centres exposes them to severe mental health risks.
“It’s important to recognise that putting children and adolescents into correctional facilities for detention could sometimes cause more harm than good, as it may lead to depression, anxiety disorder, PTSD, and even substance use disorder, and so on. So, there is a need to ensure age-appropriate detention facilities, programmes, and interventions for rehabilitation and early support are made available by all and sundry,” Mr Kareem said.
The psychiatrist explained that children in such facilities are easily influenced by adults, often imitating harmful behaviours, including violence.
“You know, children are easily suggestible; they can easily model what the seniors in the facilities are torturing them after. So, all this can culminate in possible consequences moving forward. So, this underscores the need to consider them for rehabilitation and early intervention, rather than putting them in adult correctional facilities,” he added.
On her part, Aisha Bubah, lead psychologist at The Sunshine Series, a mental health social enterprise operating in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African countries, called for an end to the detention of children.
Mrs Bubah argued that available evidence shows detention exposes children to multiple psychosocial disorders instead of fostering rehabilitation.
“We need to end the detention of children in adult prisons. It exposes them to so much that can end up being more detrimental than the rehabilitation that the prison system is supposed to provide.
“Also, it would help to provide psychosocial support while the person is within the prison system and outside. It’s not enough to just release someone and then just let them go,” she said.
Lack of age verification
One of the biggest challenges in Nigeria’s justice system is the lack of a reliable age verification system. Many children do not have birth certificates, leaving them vulnerable to being tried as adults.
When Omar was sentenced in Kano, north-west Nigeria, public reports confirmed he was 13. Yet during his appeal, the High Court judge claimed he was 17, not 13, which raised serious concerns about record-keeping and judicial oversight.
In Mr Olowookere’s case, the Chief Registrar of the Osun High Court insisted that reports about his age were “distorted and misrepresented.”
Children of war and insecurity
In Nigeria’s north-east, the situation is arguably more terrible. Reports by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations show that the Nigerian military detained thousands of children during counter-insurgency operations against Boko Haram. Some were as young as five.
Held in overcrowded military facilities without charge, these children were branded as security threats instead of victims of war. Many spent months or years in detention without ever seeing a lawyer, judge, or social worker.
In 2010, a paper titled “Children, Status and the Law in Nigeria” by Onyemachi Uche observed that children were typically involved in minor offences such as stealing pieces of meat from a cooking pot or taking food and toys from their playmates.
Some of the children later became involved in serious crimes like rape, drug trafficking, armed robbery, arson, vandalism, child soldiering, suicide bombing, and other forms of terrorism.
The paper argued that this trend has been rising because children’s vulnerabilities are consistently exploited by criminal networks and armed groups that recruit and use them. It further noted that Nigeria’s child justice system contributes to the problem by punishing child offenders instead of rehabilitating them. As a result, many children are released back into society with criminal records and traumatic experiences. They often return to crime and, in some cases, recruit more children into gangs.
Accurate statistics on the number of vulnerable children in Nigeria remain unavailable. However, children are generally considered vulnerable depending on their circumstances, environments, and physical realities.
Mrs Bubah, a certified Cognitive Behavioural Therapist (CBT), also emphasised these points. She explained that one of the major psychological effects of exposing minors to prison-like conditions is the heightened risk of them becoming repeat offenders, even after regaining freedom, due to the psychological disorders they are exposed to in such facilities.
“It can also lead to a higher risk of becoming an offender, or the risk of re-offending. I’m assuming the minor here is either being raised because their parents are in prison, or the person is also an offender. It increases the likelihood of re-offending because they are struggling to adjust to the system sometimes. Once they are out, they struggle to adjust to the system,” she said.
The psychologist said many of the children get into more trouble because they lack the skills to navigate life outside prison, while others deliberately reoffend because they find the outside world overwhelming and retreat into what feels like a ‘safe shell’, which is the prison environment.
The trauma within
“The moment I heard the death sentence, it felt like the end of my life. I was devastated and fell into depression,” Mr Olowookere recounted.
Mrs Bubah added that exposing minors to prison-like conditions can trigger serious mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and learning difficulties.
“I think it affects them in many ways. One, if we look at the potential of them developing mental health conditions, like anxiety, depression, or PTSD, what’s called post-traumatic stress disorder, learning difficulties, these are all mental health conditions that they can develop from being incarcerated, being in a closed space, or being regulated.
“Because of the settings of prisons, the routines and limitations and rules and regulations, it can disrupt their development,” she added.
The psychologist further observed that many minors in detention turn to drug use as a coping mechanism.
“Sometimes people who are faced with difficult, traumatic experiences end up using drugs as a coping mechanism, so if there is timely psychosocial support, it reduces the risk of the person falling into these types of unhealthy behaviours to cope.”
She also stressed that incarceration undermines a child’s ability to build trust and may foster aggression in the children.
“It can also disrupt their trust relationship, like how they build trust with their communities or other people. And it can also make them develop aggressive behaviours as a way of communication, because of all the aggression and violence they see around them. They can model those behaviours, thinking that’s the only way to get things done for you, which obviously affects their communication style.”
Findings from the joint study conducted by the Nigerian government, UNICEF, and the European Union reflected her concerns. The research gathered testimonies from children in detention facilities. While 76 per cent of respondents said they had never experienced corporal punishment in custody, 24 per cent reported being subjected to abuse or torture. Among this group, 83.7 per cent said they had suffered physical violence such as beatings, slaps, or punches; three per cent reported psychological abuse; 2.2 per cent cited food deprivation; 1.9 per cent said they were denied family visits; 1.3 per cent reported threats of violence; and 0.2 per cent disclosed sexual assault.
Despite these accounts, only 11 per cent of victims said they reported the abuse, and in almost all cases, the perpetrators were never punished. Many respondents also complained about bullying by older inmates and alleged incidents of sodomy, including situations where sex was exchanged for food.
Possible reforms
For reforms, Mrs Bubah recommended that Nigerian correctional centres be equipped with child protection frameworks and trauma-informed care to address the needs of incarcerated minors.
“We need to have trained prison staff in child protection and trauma-informed care, so they also know how they are dealing with them, so that they are not creating more scars and more trauma for these minors while they are in their protective custody. Families must be also integrated into whatever psychosocial support system is being provided, because at the end of the day, when the person goes out there, they go with family, the authorities or the counselor or whoever doesn’t follow them, so if family is involved, if there are any issues, they are more likely to flag it up faster before it becomes a bigger problem.”
Mr Kareem suggested that detained minors should be provided with physical, social, and vocational rehabilitation to support their growth and development.
“So, when they are given physical, social, and even vocational rehabilitation, it will help them develop.”
This story is part of the Hope Behind Bars Africa/Australian High Commission Dialogue Initiative.