More than 300 schoolgirls
Life is very dangerous for girls in Nigeria.
Families in Nigeria waited anxiously for news of their abducted daughters after more than 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by gunmen from a government school in the country’s north last week, the latest in a series of mass school kidnappings in the West African nation.
Worried parents on Sunday gathered at the school, guarded by police. Aliyu Ladan Jangebe said his five daughters aged between 12 and 16 were at the school when the kidnappers stormed in. Four were taken away but one escaped by hiding in a bathroom with three other girls, he told The Associated Press.
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Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the abductions and called for the girls’ “immediate and unconditional release” and safe return to their families. He called attacks on schools a grave violation of human rights and the rights of children, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
And specifically of girls – who tend to be raped and impregnated once they’re kidnapped.
The most notorious kidnapping was in April 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by the jihadist rebels of Boko Haram from the secondary school in Chibok in Borno state. More than 100 of those girls are still missing.
Seven years with Boko Haram. It’s got to be hell.
These acts of terrorism have a wider effect on society too, which is to discourage families from sending their girls to school at all.
Arcadia, isn’t that in part the intended result? Girls are not to be educated, and if the parents or girls insist on an education then there is the danger that the girls will be taken and ‘re-educated’, taught to do what girls are born to do.
The trouble is, not sending girls to school won’t be a guarantee that they won’t be taken, it’ll just mean more individual kidnappings rather than single, mass kidnappings.
I don’t mean the following to sound flippant, I’m serious when I say that there are likely some on the woke left who will see our concerns as white colonial thinking; to hold the kidnappers to our standards is white supremacism. Whether they dare voice such an opinion is another thing entirely: is there a line they won’t cross? I hope so.
I imagine that it is precisely the intended result, that’s what terrorism does after all: enact your threats on the few to alert the many that they’re for it too, if they step out of line. These girls are likely to be subject to “re-education”, and forced into what their captors think they should do: marriage and childbearing.
I suppose it’s “colonialism” to think education important, probably also “colonialism” to oppose the kidnapping of brides.
I doubt the “progressive Left” would actually say it’s colonialism though. I’m sure they’d say that education is a universal concept that all cultures practised (or that denying girls an education is a legitimate cultural practise), and that no one defends kidnapping anymore.
Having said that, I’m sure scholarly defences probably exist for both though.
Yeah, but there’s a fucking Weatherspoons or something closing down in Ponteland because of COVID so obviously the BBC has no space to report on this. They’d love to, it’s just a matter of priorities.
Apparently the girls have been freed.
The initial reports said that 316 girls had been kidnapped; thus the discrepancy.
From the reports I’ve seen, it sounds like the rash of kidnappings is more criminal than ideological; the kidnappers are looking for ransom, not wives. And while the government won’t admit it, it seems likely that they’re paying.
Ah, that’s good. Even about the criminal not ideological part.
Kidnappers getting paid for kidnapping, without an increase in security might just make an economy for kidnapping as a business pursuit, rather like other black market and illegal businesses though?
Don’t get me wrong, I really am glad they’re free, but I’m worried that it’s all the more likely it will occur again.