THE CONSENT PARADOX: WHY LEGAL REFORM HAS NOT CLOSED THE CONVICTION GAP IN RAPE CASES

Abstract

Over the past two decades, rape law across common-law jurisdictions has undergone a conceptual shift from a resistance-based model of non-consent toward standards that place the burden of ascertaining genuine agreement on the initiator of sexual contact. Nigeria has participated in this reform wave through the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 and the Evidence Act 2011, both of which broadened statutory definitions of consent and, in principle, lowered evidentiary barriers to prosecution. Yet conviction rates for rape in Nigeria remain, by most available estimates, among the lowest in the common-law world. This article argues that this is not a coincidence but a structural paradox: definitional reform of consent has outpaced reform of the evidentiary doctrines, institutional capacity, and social attitudes that actually determine whether a reported rape becomes a conviction. Using Nigerian case law on the judicially developed corroboration requirement, the persistence of the marital rape exemption, and the incomplete state-by-state domestication of the VAPP Act, the article traces why the widening of what counts as valid consent on paper has not translated into a narrowing of the gap between reports and convictions in practice. It closes with a set of legislative, institutional, and evidentiary reforms modelled partly on South Africa’s statutory abolition of the cautionary rule.