Free from Boko Haram,but is the Nightmare really over?

 

For months, they were kept in tiny thatched huts in the middle of the forest, waiting with dread each evening for their rapists to return. During the almost intolerable violence, the young women’s minds drifted to escape or death. The victims were as young as 8.

At the heart of Boko Haram’s self-proclaimed caliphate in northeastern Nigeria was a savage campaign of rape and sexual slavery that has only recently been uncovered. Thousands of girls and women were held against their will, subject to forced marriages and relentless indoctrination. Those who resisted were often shot. Now, many of the women are suddenly free — rescued in a series of Nigerian military operations over the past year that dislodged the extremist Islamist group from most of the territory it controlled. But there have been few joyous family reunions for the victims.

Most of the surviving women no longer have homes. Their cities were burned to the ground. The military has quietly deposited them in displacement camps or abandoned buildings, where they are monitored by armed men suspicious of their loyalties. They are still labeled “Boko Haram wives.”

Few could have imagined such an outcome two years ago, when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram and the world responded with theBring Back Our Girls campaign. While most of those schoolgirls from Chibok are still missing, many people assumed the other kidnapped women would be warmly welcomed back.

Instead, they are shunned.

Read full report  Here