Giving Compass' Take:

· Global Citizen tells the story of a young university student in Nigeria who used social media to provide proof of her professor's sexual harassment. In this story, Monica Osagie recorded her professor's demands for sex with her phone and posted them on different platforms, leading to a full-scale investigation of allegations. 

· How is technology providing a platform for victims to speak on their assault? 

· It's time to confront the realities of sexual harassment in education.

In April this year, a recording was released that exposed a lecturer in a local Nigerian university, asking a student to sleep with him in exchange for better marks. The student, 23-year-old Monica Osagie of Obafemi Awolowo University, downloaded a cell phone app, and used it to record a conversation with her lecturer, where he demanded sex in exchange for improving her grades. The recording was released online, and very quickly went viral, shared across social media platforms like Twitter and Whatsapp.

In the recording, you can hear the lecturer bargaining with Osagie and demanding she sleep with him five separate times, to increase her mark from a fail to a pass. He is heard telling her, “The other <student> has come, and I told her straight away because there is nothing I can do to bail that person out and her mark is even better than your own. The person scored 39 while your own is 33.”

Despite his insistence, Osagie replies, “Prof, you know what? Let me fail it."

In a country where the whispers of similar stories — whispers that are so loud they regularly feature as a plot in Nigeria’s Nollywood movies — this event was considered groundbreaking as it was the first time actual proof of such behavior had been released publicly.

Technology has revolutionized our ability to share atrocities like these in areas around the world, when many would normally have been overlooked. Our mobile devices can be powerful tools in a society that continues to demand “proof” and often blames the woman when she finds herself in such dangerous situations, or doubts the bold victim that comes out to share her story.

Read the full article about sexual harassment by Neku Atawodi-Edun at Global Citizen.