Hundreds of women and girls captured by Boko Haram have been raped, many repeatedly, in what officials and relief workers describe as a deliberate strategy to dominate rural residents and possibly even create a new generation of Islamist militants in Nigeria.
In interviews, the women described being locked in houses by the dozen, at the beck and call of fighters who forced them to have sex, sometimes with the specific goal of impregnating them.
“They married me,” said Hamsatu, 25, a young woman in a black-and-purple head scarf, looking down at the ground. She said she was four months pregnant, that the father was a Boko Haram member and that she had been forced to have sex with other militants who took control of her town.
Perhaps I don’t read the right papers, or perhaps I am not tuned in enough to contemporary ways of communication such as social media … but even so, I am surprised to have seen little comment by feminists on this appalling crime, and the equivalent horrors inflicted on Yazidi women in Iraq. Is there a women’s movement campaign being organised to ask governments to make this a crime against humanity, and to seek to detain and punish the perpetrators? I do not mean this as a rhetorical question: I would be glad to learn of such a campaign, and to support it as much as I could.
Still, you can’t help but wonder whether, in outrage as in everything else, there are fashions. And attacking this wickedness, and the men who perpetrate it, does not seem to be as fashionable as other causes nearer home that are actually far less significant.