Last week, some 200 females were rescued, and their stories paint a nightmare picture of how Boko Haram treats its female prisoners.
“The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women,” said the Borno State of Nigeria governor, Kashim Shettima. “Some of them, I was told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology.”
These victims, many now pregnant and living in refugee camps, represent a small percentage of the more than 2,000 women and girls the group has kidnapped in just the last year.
This is our fourth pick for you this week, not because it’s an easy read, but because we think it’s important to recognize rape is used a weapon of war. It’s used to disenfranchise a population, to beat out the hope of a future. Society crumbles without strong female voices, without women able to inspire their children or to advance themselves. With mothers and sister feeling traumatized, shameful and degraded, the terror group can better control the population. We cannot stand for this human rights atrocity in Nigeria, or at home. It’s easy to tune out these stories, but please don’t.
We think it is serious. Very serious. We think this acceptance, this tolerance of violence in jokes and in its physical manifestation contribute to a culture of silencing women, just as Boko Haram has set out to do in Nigeria. The big difference worth considering is how there it is used in as a tool of war, whereas here it’s just part of our culture.