October 27, 2014

Life under Boko Haram

located:	Nigeria
editor:	Vanessa Ellingham

Mandatory religious conversion, rape, torture, forced labour, psychological abuse: life for women and girls captured by Boko Haram is even worse than we might have imagined.

A new report by Human Rights Watch collects testimonies from women and girls who have been kept in Boko Haram's camps.

More than 500 females have been kept in the militant group's camps since 2009, with 276 having been captured from a school in Chibok in April this year.

Almost two weeks ago the Nigerian government announced that Boko Haram had agreed to a ceasefire, which they expected would be followed by releasing the remaining Chibok girls held at the camps. However this result remains to be seen.

The HRW report documented treatment of the cruellest kind.

“They and many others they saw in the camps were subjected to physical and psychological abuse; forced labour; forced participation in military operations, including carrying ammunition or luring men into ambush; forced marriage to the captors; and sexual abuse, including rape,” the report says. “In addition, they were made to cook, clean and perform other household chores. Others served as porters, carrying the loot stolen by the insurgents from villages and towns they had attacked.”

A 15-year-old girl who was held in a Boko Haram camp for four weeks in 2013 described being forced to marry a militant more than twice her age. “After we were declared married I was ordered to live in his cave but I always managed to avoid him. He soon began to threaten me with a knife to have sex with him, and when I still refused he brought out his gun, warning that he would kill me if I shouted. Then he began to rape me every night. He was a huge man in his mid-30s and I had never had sex before. It was very painful and I cried bitterly because I was bleeding afterwards.”

The report also documents opinion from a social worker supporting women who had experienced Boko Haram's violence that rapes had been particularly underreported in local and national media because of the stigma attached to sexual abuse.