We All Are the Kidnapped Nigerian Girls - Ms Mag
Nigeria’s radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram can be looked at through many lenses. They are active in the most populous country in Africa. They are waging terrorist war on Africa’s newly minted largest economy, blowing up bus terminals and killing innocents. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan is sitting on the largest oil patch in Africa; Boko Haram knows it. Rumored to be training in Somalia under the tutelege of Al Qaeda or, according to some reports, Al-Shabab, Boko Haram travels over land to perfect terrorist tactics and benefits from the deep pockets of the more arguably more established organizations.
Those lenses, for the moment, don’t interest me. Here’s what does: the abduction and selling into sex slavery over 200 girls in northern Nigeria and the appalling lack of US media coverage (in a meaningful, real way). What lens are we to look at that through?
How about this: the worldwide devaluation of women and girls. The refusal of the media to declare there is a full-scale international war on women. Headlines in the media exclaim: Schoolgirls forced into so-called marriages to militants by their captors. Outrageous isn’t it?
But forced into marriage is a sanitized way of avoiding the truth. The girls were reportedly sold (some reports say for $12) into a life of non-stop rape. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau first threatened to treat captured women and girls as slaves in a video released in May 2013. Are we surprised?