Nepal | The Lost Girls: One woman’s battle to end child marriage
NEPAL — Each year, 15 million girls are married before the age of 18. That’s 28 girls every minute, and one girl every two seconds. In Nepal, one in three girls under the age of 18 are married. One in 10 girls under the age of 15 are married.
The culture of child marriage is accepted in this country. In some cases it’s forced, but in others it’s consensual. The act of child marriage, which is punishable by jail time, has been illegal in Nepal since 1963.
CBSN’s Reena Ninan traveled to a rural village to witness an illegal wedding firsthand.
“How do you feel?,” Ninan asked the young girl. “Do you feel nervous? Do you think you should have waited a little bit longer to get married?”
“Yes,” the 17-year-old girl replied.
In 2014, Nepal pledged to end child marriage by 2020. But just two years later, it pushed back its goal to 2030.
Importance of education
According to the U.N., child marriage only perpetuates the cycle of poverty. When parents force their daughters to marry young, they drop out of school, face domestic violence and are more likely to die from pregnancy complications.
Rachana Sunar, 22, lives in a village in Western Nepal. Her mission is to stop the age-old practice of child marriage, which is no easy feat.
In another life, she would have been forced into marriage by now. She’d have a few kids and would be silenced at home. But she begged, pleaded and managed to get a scholarship to study abroad, which in turn changed her fate for the better.
Now, Rachana is going door-to-door to spread her message to prevent child marriage. She’s phased by little and willingly resorts to extreme measures like going to the police to report and forcibly stop marriages, sometimes right on the wedding day. To locals, those actions are seen as provocative. Many people believe she should quiet down and lower her profile, including her own mother.
“She’s in the limelight now, but that makes me worry,” her mother said. “She has enemies. A lot of the villagers don’t like her. I fear that she may be raped, or that someone might knock her off the road.”
During Ninan’s stay, Rachana stopped a wedding by calling the police. And overnight, her mother’s worst fear came true — an angry mob confronted Rachana at her home. But she didn’t let the incident prevent her from losing sight of her main goal.
“If a girl hears my story, and how I started my journey, at least I’m giving hope to them,” she added. “There are some people who don’t like the work I am doing. If I die for this reason, I know my sisters will be inspired and they will carry on.”
“If I lose hope, if I give up, nobody will dare to take this issue ahead,” she continued. “I’m happy to put my life at risk.”
Shortly after filming, Rachana stopped another three weddings. Her work has spurred a movement to end child marriage in her home district of Surkhet by 2020, ahead of the government’s 2030 target to wipe out the practice nationally.
She recently started an NGO called Sambad, which means “dialogue” in Nepalese, to help boys and girls alike discover their self-worth. She’s been fighting to empower the youth to focus on the importance of education. But in this conservative society, change isn’t easy. For some, this is the only education they will ever receive. For others, it’s the only place they’ll ever feel loved.
(ABUJA, Nigeria) — The 82 freed Chibok schoolgirls arrived in Nigeria’s capital on Sunday to meet President Muhammadu Buhari as anxious families awaited an official list of names and looked forward to reuniting three years after the mass abduction.
The newly released girls arrived at the Abuja airport and were met by the Buhari’s chief of staff, presidential adviser Femi Adesina said. The president was expected to meet with the schoolgirls at 4 p.m. local time.
The 82 girls were freed Saturday in exchange for an unspecified number of detained suspected Boko Haram extremists, Buhari’s office said in a statement.
This is the largest negotiated release so far of the nearly 300 girls whose abduction in 2014 highlighted the threat of Nigeria’s homegrown extremists who are linked to the Islamic State group. Before Saturday’s release, 195 of the girls had been captive. Now 113 of the girls remain unaccounted for.
A first group of 21 girls were released in October as Nigeria announced it had begun negotiations with the extremist group. At the time, the government denied making an exchange for Boko Haram suspects or paying ransom.
The girls released in October have been reported to be in government care in Abuja for medical attention, trauma counseling and rehabilitation, according to the government. Human rights groups have criticized the decision to keep the girls in custody in Abuja, nearly 900 kilometers (560 miles) from Chibok.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which along with the Swiss government mediated months of negotiations between Nigeria’s government and Boko Haram, said the newly released girls soon would meet with their families.
The ICRC also tweeted what might be the first public image of the freed schoolgirls on Sunday, showing a line of young women wearing shirts with the ICRC logo waiting to board a helicopter.
The ICRC said it had acted as a neutral intermediary to transport the freed girls into Nigerian government custody.
Long-suffering family members said they were eagerly awaiting a list of names and their “hopes and expectations are high.”
The Bring Back Our Girls campaign said Sunday it was happy that Nigeria’s government had committed to rescuing the 113 remaining schoolgirls. “We urge the president and his government to earnestly pursue the release of all our Chibok girls and other abducted citizens of Nigeria,” the group said in a statement.
The 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok in 2014 are among thousands of people abducted by Boko Haram over the years.
The mass abduction brought the extremist group’s rampage in northern Nigeria to world attention and began years of heartbreak for the families of the missing schoolgirls.
Some relatives did not live to see their daughters released. Many of the captive girls, most of them Christians, were forced to marry their captors and give birth to children in remote forest hideouts without knowing if they would see their parents again. It is feared that other girls were strapped with explosives and sent on missions as suicide bombers.
A Nigerian military official with direct knowledge of the rescue operation said the freed girls were found near the town of Banki in Borno state near Cameroon.
Boko Haram remains active in that area. On Friday, the United States and Britain issued warnings that the extremist group was actively planning to kidnap foreigners in an area of Borno state “along the Kumshe-Banki axis.”
Buhari late last year announced Boko Haram had been “crushed,” but the group continues to carry out attacks in northern Nigeria and neighboring countries. Its insurgency has killed more than 20,000 people and driven 2.6 million from their homes, with millions facing starvation.
It’s been a long time since these girls were taken from their homes and their village. I am sure it seems much, much longer to them. I don’t know exactly what tragedies they have survived, but I know that they have survived because they are courageous, and because they love life. I honor them and their survival and now I ask for prayers for their continued healing, that they are able to make whole lives for themselves, and to move on from this terrible experience they have lived through.
It is my solemn hope that this kind of experience will never happen to a group of young girls ever again. That they will not be kidnapped, taken from their homes, lives and families; that their lives will not be reduced to be owned and controlled by terrorists or warriors again.
National Historic Park Honoring Harriet Tubman May Soon Become a Reality
Kirstin Fawcett
Harriet Tubman’s residence near Auburn, New York is now closer than ever to becoming an official national historic park, the Associated Press reports.
According to New York state senator Charles Schumer, the Department of the Interior has finalized a land transfer agreement that allows for the National Park Service to create the park. Now, all the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park needs to become a reality is approval from the secretary of the interior. (Congress approved legislation to create the park in December 2014, along with a similar park near Tubman’s birthplace on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.)
In 1859, the famed Underground Railroad conductor moved to the Auburn area—then home to a strong abolitionist community—after New York senator William Seward offered to sell her his home. Tubman lived there with her parents, and in 1896, purchased 25 acres of adjoining land to build a housing community for elderly African-Americans, eventually called the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. In 1903, Tubman deeded the home to a local church, the Thompson Memorial AME Zion Church, on the condition that they manage the home.
The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park will include several properties, Syracuse.com reports. The land transfer deal approved by the Department of the Interior allows for the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc. and AME Zion Church to sell its ownership of the church and the Home for the Aged Rectory to the federal government. Meanwhile, Tubman’s former home, the Home for the Aged, and a historic barn will be jointly run by the National Park Service and Harriet Tubman Home, Inc. through a preservation easement.
“As a New Yorker and an American, I’m deeply proud to see Tubman Park finally become a reality,” Schumer said in a statement quoted by Syracuse.com. “The Tubman Historic Park in Auburn will be a magnet for visitors that will tell the amazing story of Harriet Tubman’s life, an extraordinary American, and her story deserves to be shared with our children and grandchildren. This park will serve that solemn purpose and preserve her legacy for countless generations to come.”
I Like To Think of Harriet Tubman
by Susan Griffin
I like to think of Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman who carried a revolver,
who had a scar on her head from a rock through
by a slave-master (because she
talked back), and who
had a ransom on her head
of thousands of dollars and who
was never caught, and who
had no use for the law
when the law was wrong,
who defied the law, I like
to think of her.
I like to think of her especially
when I think of the problem of
feeding children.
The legal answer
to the problem of feeding children
is ten free lunches every month,
being equal, in the child’s real life,
to eating lunch every other day.
Monday, but not Tuesday.
I like to think of the President
eating lunch Monday, but not
Tuesday.
And when I think of the President
and the law, and the problem of
feeding children, I like to
think of Harriet Tubman
and her revolver.
And then sometimes
I think of the President
and other men,
men who practice the law,
who revere the law,
who make the law,
who enforce the law
who live behind
and operate through
and feed themselves
at the expense of
starving children
because of the law,
men who sit in paneled offices
and think about vacations
and tell women
whose care it is
to feed children
not to be hysterical
not to be hysterical as in the word
hysterikos, the greek for
womb suffering,
not to suffer in their wombs,
not to care,
not to bother the men
because they want to think
of other things
and do not want
to take the women seriously.
I want them
to take women seriously
I want them to think about Harriet Tubman,
and remember,
remember she was beat by a white man
and she lived
and she lived to redress her grievances
and she lived in swamps
and wore the clothes of a man
bringing hundreds of fugitives from
slavery, and was never caught,
and led an army,
and won a battle,
and defied the laws
because the laws were wrong, I want men
to take us seriously.
I am tired of wanting them to think
about right and wrong.
I want them to fear.
I want them to feel fear now
as I have felt suffering in the womb, and
I want them
to know
that there is always a time
there is always a time to make right
what is wrong,
there is always a time
for retribution
and that time
is beginning.
The African American and their his/herstory with Missionaries.
The 1831 slave rebellion that is the inspiration for the new movie The Birth of a Nation is commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, after the enslaved man (played by controversial filmmaker Nate Parker) who led the uprising that left dozens of people, including children, dead.
But there’s another name for that historical event: The Southampton Rebellion, after the Virginia county in which it took place.
And, says Vanessa M. Holden, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University who is working on a book about the topic, that name is a more accurate description of what actually happened. Though Nat Turner was the man whose name has gone down in history as synonymous with rebellion, the entire community was involved. Holden recalls reading about the rebellion as an undergraduate student and realizing that almost everything she could find approached the event in one of two ways: dissecting Turner’s character to figure out why he had instigated the uprising, or examining the broad implications and impact of what he did. There was little time spent on the rest of the people who participated, and especially little time spent on the women.
“There’s a broad misconception that it’s almost impossible to find material about enslaved women, but when I’m asked what sources I look at, I actually look at the same sources everybody else looks at,” Holden says. “I just ask, Where are the women?”
And in fact, though only person among the dozens tried for the rebellion and executed by the state was a woman, Holden says she has found plenty of evidence from court records and other sources that women were deeply involved in what happened. The involvement of the woman who did hang was undeniable—she held her mistress down to try to ensure that the rebels would kill her, Holden says, but her mistress lived to tell the tale—and many others who were not found guilty were just as implicated as some of the men who were later executed. For example, both women and men were spotted near the sites of murders along the route of the uprising.
In addition, historians have shown that free women of color and enslaved women were deeply involved in the work of “everyday resistance” to slavery. That resistance could take forms that ranged from work stoppages or slow-downs to sheltering and feeding runaways. They were involved in illicit meetings that kept the black church alive, and they were crucial conduits for information.
“Women were essential to those sorts of everyday actions,” Holden says. “They’re not afterthoughts and they’re not being told what to do by men. They’re actually orchestrating these kinds of actions every single day.”
So why isn’t that history better known?
There are a few reasons, Holden explains. For one thing, there was an obvious incentive among the slaves and their supporters to minimize the number of people implicated in insurrection. And the source material historians use makes it easy to focus on Turner. His published jailhouse “confession” helped spread the word about what had happened, helping it become, as Holden says, “historicized almost as soon as it happened.”
For another thing, a primary goal of the trials and executions that took place following the uprising was to lessen the impact on white slaveholders, not to achieve justice. (Holden points to Patrick Breen’s scholarship on the subject as supporting this view of the trials as “an elaborate exercise in mastery.”) Emphasizing Nat Turner’s role was a way to create an image of “this ultimate rebellion slave who was just deranged and convinced people who would otherwise have been happy slaves” to rebel. As a result, the idea of resistance didn’t have to be quite so terrifying—which comforted slaveholders and served as a rebuttal for those who might use the uprising as a reason to support abolition. In fact, even the Virginia legislature did debate ending slavery in the wake of the event, but the voices in favor of maintaining the institution were stronger. It was safer for the rulers of the slave economy to position Turner as one bad apple than to admit that any person of color in the region would have had a motive to do what he did.
“If they really did investigate everybody who could have possibly been involved, they would have had every slave in Southampton in the courtroom,” Holden says. “The truth is that everybody had a reason to rebel.”
And that, she says, is the most important thing for anyone seeing The Birth of a Nation to remember: slavery was always awful. That always crucial point gains an extra layer of importance in light of the brutality and violence of the Southampton Rebellion.
“Slavery wasn’t evil at the hands of one evil master; it wasn’t only evil in moments of extreme violence and torture or extreme moments of deprivation; it wasn’t only evil when families got separated. It was evil every moment of every day. In turn, resisting slavery always meant making a conscious decision to do harm—economically, socially, physically, mentally, emotionally—because the system was abhorrent,” Holden says. “It’s important to remember that the violence [in Southampton] was a direct response to the specter of violence that was American slavery. It’s not fair to the historical subjects that I study, the women, to assume that they could only be victims of that violence.”
I dedicate this post to the thousands of men and women who were sold into slavery and treated like animals. My heart is heavy for you and I can’t tell you but I will work for your grandchildren and great grandchildren. I will speak for them and support them. I will stand up for them. They are equal to me and my grandchildren.
America has a lot to be ashamed about in our history. The are four huge things I am going to mention. There are others, and though we like to think of ourselves as the standard that all countries should strive for, we are not. The first is our indigenous population, the many tribes of Native Americans who lived here for centuries before white Europeans came to these shores. I am sure it was unnerving to have the strange colored and strangely dressed people arrive at their shores, yet they welcomed these new people.
Despite the myth of Thanksgiving, we came and brought disease and began to take their land. They had been the caretakers of all of this beautiful land that comprises America for centuries. The land was lush and fertile. It was full of wild animals, including buffalo. There was more than enough bounty to go around. The indigenous people did not pollute the water or the air. They proudly took care of their land. White people came in an took the land and killed the “American Indians” or fought them in bloody battles. White people would not give up so they killed thousands of braves, the women and children. We “gave” them little patches of worthless land (that they already owned) and made treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Still to this day, they care for Mother Earth as best as they can.
Our second shame is the issue of slavery. The first black men were brought to Jamestown in chains in the 1600’s. They were brought to sell to people who wanted them to do work their new owners didn’t want to do. The south became the biggest owner of slaves because of the plantations and crops such as tobacco, cotton and sugar cane. There were some slaves early on in the north but the practice didn’t last long. The 1840 census showed that New Hampshire had one slave.
Today slavery is long gone, thanks to a war. Even after the Civil War, the South enacted segregation and an organization called the Klu Klux Klan was formed. It was made up of cowardly southern men who rode at night under white sheets lynching Black people, beating them up. Setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner for the helpless black people.
We now have our first black president and I voted for him twice. His Presidency has brought out the racism that is still alive and well in America. Which brings me to the group Black Lives Matter. I believe in Black Lives Matter. There is no need for White Lives Matter because here in America White lives are the only lives that matter in the eyes of too many people, and often in the eyes of the law.
In 1947, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and much of our Navy Fleet was lost. We lost many sailors and navy nurses. The attack was a terrible shock to America. My father kept a file about the attack that I found in 1984 when he died. Japan had woken the sleeping Tiger that was the U.S., and they payed the ultimate price, unfortunately. After the Pearl Harbor attack, came our third great shame, when we rounded up all Japanese people and some who looked oriental and put them in internment camps. We even included the Japanese who were born here and had lived in America their entire lives. Why? The were different. They were a different color, and LOOKED like the enemy, so they were judged to BE the enemy.
In 2001, we were attacked again by religious Jihadists. The hit us in three locations: The Pentagon, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and a hijacked plane that was brought down by the passengers rather than let it fly to Washington DC. This attack was allegedly done “in the name of Islam” (although Islam is a peaceful religion) and over 3000 people were directly killed and many first responders have died since. Our fourth shame comes in because many here in America blame every Muslim. The vast majority of Muslims had no more idea of what was going to happen on September 11 than any non-Muslim, and are just as hurt, angered and appalled. But, because we are scared, we want to make all Muslims responsible. It’s easier for us to blame them because they often are a different color and dress differently, but this is not fair. Some want to keep all Muslims out of America. This is not right, and goes against everything America stands for, particularly the 1st Amendment Right of Freedom of Religion. There are many Muslims who are as peaceful and loving in their religious beliefs as anyone else, and should be able to come here and live.
Despite all the wrongs we have done to the Native Americans, they are now finally using their right to protest. They are protesting the continuation of the pipeline through their lands in the Dakotas. Whites should care as much about this land as do the descents of those from whom it was stolen. Native Americans are still taking of Mother Earth. Please listen to the important video below. Listen and take a stand. One you can be proud of.
First of all, I am totally behind this movement. In fact, I hope it grows by leaps and bounds. I also wish it started a couple of hundred years ago. This is not realistic, I know, but I wish it were.
I have been writing at different times about Black Americans who, through luck or circumstance, have made a difference in the world; enough of a difference that history records their deeds and contributions to civilizations. Inventors, freedom fighters, writers, fighters for freedom, poets, doctors and others.
Because every black life matters, I want to take the time to honor every black person who survived every day of their life in slavery. They all matter. Every black person who lived through segregation matters; From the domestics who worked for white people, to those who drank at the black water fountain to those who rode at the back of buses. Black men who were referred to as “boy”; any black person who was referred to as “nigger”: You all shine to me. Your courage and strength of character is amazing. You were brave and tread where angels feared to go.
Since there has been integration — at the cost of hundreds of black lives and Martin Luther King Jr. , JFK and Bobby Kennedy — there have been some improvements. My children and grandchildren went to school with and are friends with black people and other minorities, including Native Americans.
Today, there should be no more racism. In America alone, there are millions of black people who have so much to give. What they need is for us white, Caucasian, people to let go of racism and give them a chance at educations equal to what our children receive.
Black parents need to tell your children that they are wonderful and smart and will be successful in life. However to do this, they need to be able to stop spending time teaching their children what to do when the inevitable cop stops them because of the color of their skin. How to answer their questions, where their hands should be, the tone of voice they should use: the type of training white children never receive because no cop will stop and frisk them for being white.
In another life, I marched and picketed in many cities in different states including Washington DC. I never got arrested. I believe my whiteness had a lot to do with that. I can have a sarcastic voice, so I doubt it was because I was so sweet.
American society has pushed the black portion of our society about as far as they are willing to go. I don’t blame them. Would your white friends take what black people are expected to swallow? Mine wouldn’t and neither would I.
America has come to yet another fork in the road that makes up our society. There have been enough black lives taken, like Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown and so many others. What could they have accomplished had they not been treated as “other” all of their lives? What if they had been told how well they were doing in school, if college had been talked about as a natural step in their growing up? What if their teachers had told them to keep working, they were going to make it? What if one or two had graduated as Valedictorian?
What if every child in America, no matter what color they were, or what disabilities they had, would have an equal chance in their life?
Well, I am going to say it to any one who wants to hear it:
You, too, are America.
You are a unique child of God/Goddess and you can accomplish whatever you want to.
You are good, smart, strong and people believe in you.
You can ignore those around you who don’t want you to succeed.
You were made to accomplish big things and you can.
Believe in yourself,
I believe in you. I believe in every black person in America.
Black Lives Do Indeed Matter.
Namaste
Barbara
Some of the great Back Americans who have made America stronger.
“You showed no kind of mercy,” Judge Leslie Ghiz said.
In turn, Ghiz said she’d have no mercy on Corcoran and sentenced her to 51 years to life during her sentencing Tuesday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.
Corcoran, 32, of Warren County, pleaded guilty in June to multiple counts of complicity to rape, of human trafficking and child endangering involving the child. Corcoran also admitted giving the girl heroin sometimes as a reward. The child vomited each time.
Ghiz allowed Corcoran to read a statement in court.
“I made selfish, horrible choices that will affect (the girl) for the rest of her life,” Corcoran said. “I am consumed by guilt and shame every day.”
That didn’t move the judge.
The girl was sodomized, raped, forced to perform oral sex and frequently videotaped by Corcoran’s drug dealer in his Camp Washington home, prosecutors say. The encounters happened between February and June 2014.
Shandell Willingham, 42, who faces the same charges as Corcoran, has been convicted in Indiana on unrelated drug charges as well as on child pornography charges. He was returned to Hamilton County last month. A hearing in his case is set for Aug. 10.
CINCINNATI.COM
Child sex for heroin allegation ‘sad, but not surprising’
The girl’s grandparents told the judge they hoped for justice for their granddaughter and that others would be protected from Corcoran. The girl’s grandmother spoke quietly in court.
“I saw my granddaughter. I heard her small voice,” Sylvia Corcoran said. “It was horrific. How could she (Corcoran) do this? I don’t know if my granddaughter is going to be able to have a normal life.”
The girl, now, 13, is living out of state with her father and stepmother.
Ghiz said she had to take breaks while reading everything that was admitted into the court case.
“I can honestly say that, in three-and-a-half years on the bench, this is by far the worst thing that has come before this court,” Ghiz said. And she’s seen everything from thefts to physical harm done by people addicted to heroin, she said.
“I don’t know that you grasp the damage that has been done to this poor child,” Ghiz said, noting that the girl is undergoing medical care, has had suicidal thoughts and is taking medications.
Corcoran’s lawyer, James Bogen, said his client has been “sickened and disgusted” by what she’s done since she’s been jailed.
Dr. Daniel Bebo of UC Health told the court that when someone’s in withdrawal from opioids or heroin, “There’s a lot of leeway to what they’ll say or do.”
But he confirmed Bogen’s statement in court about addicts: “They still know right from wrong.”
Staff writer Kevin Grasha contributed.
This case sickens me and makes me feel that we can never save every child. But we can and we will. The sentence this woman received was just and fair. What she allowed her daughter to live through is beyond description.
What a sad way to begin your life. That little girl needs a lot of counseling and people who care about her to surround her with positiveness, love, support and patience.
So in the middle of wars, insurrections, domestic terrorism, Domestic Violence, rape; we must not forget the human trafficking that continues to go on. You can help. If you see or hear something suspicious report it. Better to be wrong than to let something terrible happen to someone.
Human trafficking is increasing in infrequency and young people of all colors are being taken and sold. This is just slavery, pure and simple. Every human being has a God given right to live free, to make their own decisions and to never be owned by another human being. I believe that sentences for human trafficking should always be life without parole. The cost of the crime should be worse than people want to pay.
As we know all too well, the Revolutionary War was not fought so that all men could be free, but its role in creating the seeds of abolition should not be forgotten.
A central myth of American history teaching is that the American Revolution was fought for the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of each person. By each, Jefferson sadly meant mainly white farmers. This patriotic myth—what I call a Founding Amnesia—drove Frederick Douglass, in1852, to declare that the Fourth of July was not for slaves.
But perhaps in contrast to its long history of racist exclusion, the Daughters of the American Revolution should first honor black Patriots. As Georg Daniel Flohr, a German private who fought at the decisive battle Yorktown with the French Royal Deux-Ponts for the Patriots, noted while walking around the field of battle the next day: “all over the place and wherever you looked, corpses… lying about that had not been buried; the larger part of these were Mohren [Moors, blacks].”
And as I emphasize in Black Patriots and Loyalists (2012), the acme of freedom in the American Revolution was the gradual emancipation of slaves in Vermont (not yet a state) in 1777, in Pennsylvania in 1780, in Massachusetts in 1782, in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, in New York in 1799, and in New Jersey in 1804. If we ask the central question in American history: how did there come to be a free North to oppose bondage in the Civil War, the answer is, surprisingly: gradual emancipation during and just after the American Revolution. Thus, black Patriots and their white abolitionist allies played a central, undiscussed role both in battle and in the deepening of American freedom.
Finally, why did the man believed to be the first martyr of the American Revolution, Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave of black and Native American parentage who became a sailor, fiercely take on the Redcoats in the Boston Massacre? Attucks is part of a complex history that reveals how much the Revolutionary War and the Fourth of July are a day that belongs to African Americans.
1. The violent fight against Imperial press-gangs
The first part of this story is the emergence of a violent revolutionary movement of self-defense among sailors in the 18th century. The Imperial Navy needed bodies for its expanding empire. But the crown had never relied on volunteers. Instead, it sent armed gangs to kidnap people at sea or in the street. But people did not go willingly. All around the Atlantic—in Antigua, Jamaica, Halifax, and Boston, for example—there were 604 uprisings against these royal gangs in the 18th century.
Sailors often defended themselves with pikes or muskets. Soldiers and sailors were killed in such raids.
The greatest of these uprisings was a three day battle in Boston against Admiral Knowles’s gangs in 1746. In the Independent Advertiser in 1747, Sam Adams wrote that multiracial, multinational movement against press-gangs was a driving force in making a free regime: “All Men are by nature on a Level: born with an equal Share of Freedom, and endow’d with Capacities nearly alike.”
Whole communities rebelled against the gangs. Women, left behind, were called “Impressment widows.”Mary Jones, an Irish teenager, and her children starved after her husband was taken during the Falklands war scare of 1770. Mary was arrested for shoplifting a small piece of muslin. Suckling one of her children even as the noose was put around her neck, she was hung. British “law” meant hanging and it was used depravedly against the poor. And in the colonies, it was worse.
Merchants and members of the Boston House of Representatives feared revolutionary crowds. They denounced “a tumultuous riotous assembling of armed Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and others… tending to the Destruction of all Government and Order.”The phrase, “Armed Seaman, Servants, Negroes, and others” became almost a formula in such denunciations. They would be echoed by many later historians.
But a vast, Atlantic-wide succession of rebellions against Impressment was the key feature of the run up to the Revolution. These rebellions mobilized sailors against the crown, motivated them to participate vigorously in other demonstrations about taxes, and taught them, their relatives and communities, in Lockean terms, the need for violent self-defense. In America, press-gangs made revolutionaries.
Now black escapees, like Crispus Attucks, often found freedom at sea. Sailors, notably blacks, would lead revolutionary crowds against press-gangs and other abuses.
In 1760 in Jamaica, Tacky’s Rebellion, the largest uprising against bondage until that time, lasted for 4 months. Between 1760 and 1775, the outbreak of the American Revolution, some 20 slave uprisings took place in Bermuda, Nevis, Surinam, British Honduras, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Vincent, Tobago, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. Kitts.
Seized without compensation, forced to abandon their families, sailors on British ships often identified with slaves. They took the word to London and Boston. In 1760, J. Philmore talked with mariners on London docks, and wrote the memorable Two Dialogues concerning the Man-Trade. In the broad abolitionist movement in England and America, Philmore’s 1760 pamphlet marks the most thorough transition politically from fighting for the basic “rights of an Englishman” to natural, universal or what we name today humanrights. Unlike non-abolitionist authors, Philmore replaces the commonly labeled “slave trade”—a pro-bondage appellation which falsely legitimizes owners, merchants, and hunters—with the shocking but true name: the Man-trade. James Otis wrote a similar pamphlet in Boston. These ideas would be discussed in every poor people’s tavern in the 11 years leading up to the Revolution and shape rank-and-file abolitionism.
Integrated riots against press-gangs marked the pre-Revolutionary period as well as protest against taxes on tea or stamped paper. In Newport in June 1765, 500 “seamen, boys, and Negroes” rioted after five weeks of impressment. In Norfolk in 1767, Captain Jeremiah Morgan retreated, sword in hand, before a mob of armed whites and Negroes. “Good God,” he wrote to the governor, “was your Honour and I to prosecute all the Rioters that attacked us belonging to Norfolk there would not be twenty left unhang’d belonging to the Toun.” According to Thomas Hutchinson, the Liberty Riot in Boston in I768 was as much against impressment as against the seizure of John Hancock’s sloop. To understand this militancy, we might say that a second and deeper emancipatory revolution against bondage surged from the Caribbean via sailors into the U.S. and London, and shaped the revolution for independence from Britain.
In 1776, the crown authorized large numbers of press warrants in London for bodies to fight the American Revolution. But sailors, armed, marched together “having resolved to oppose any violence that might be done to them, and rather die than assist the Royalists in shedding the Blood of their American Brethren.” This was a startling example of democratic solidarity or internationalism from below, anti-patriotic, despising the Royalists’ haughty colonialism.
2. Lord Dunmore’s Proclamations and massive black Toryism
Freedom for blacks did not come about initially on the side of those who opposed the British. From 1772 on, Royal Governor Dunmore of Virginia had threatened rebellious Patriots. “It is my fixed purpose,” he said, “to arm my own Negroes and accept all others whom I shall declare free… and I shall not hesitate at reducing [Patriots’] houses to ashes and spreading destruction wherever I can reach.” By the time he issued his Proclamation on Nov. 7, 1775, thousands of blacks had flocked to the British side to join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment. Because of Dunmore and the High Court’s 1772 Somersett decision that bondage was outlawed on English soil, the Southern states seceded from Britain to preserve slavery. In his 1775 “Taxation not Tyranny,” Samuel Johnson, the great English essayist, rightly quipped: “How come we hear the greatest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
But Dunmore’s black troops suffered smallpox; he was eventually forced to retreat to Manhattan. One of his soldiers, Titus, however, became Captain Tye, the leader of successful multiracial guerrillas operating in New Jersey. In addition, every English commander recruited blacks. And thousands of the unorganized followed every command, gradually being recruited to become soldiers or pursue jobs around the camps.
In 1779, the commander of British forces in the colonies, Sir Henry Clinton, issued a Proclamation welcoming blacks in any occupation. A huge number of escapees, perhaps 40,000, ultimately joined the Loyalists; many became regular troops, including at Yorktown. Britain did not have so many Redcoats in America so they had to rely on black troops. In 1781, Murphy Steele, a Black Pioneer, reported a vision to an aide of Sir Henry Clinton. A voice had come to him—God’s voice, he said—telling him to tell Clinton to tell General Washington that he must surrender or Clinton would recruit every black man in America to fight. Steele’s was wise strategic advice. But Clinton did not listen.
Before the Civil War, American abolitionist authors did not discuss the central role of the Empire as the freer of the most oppressed for fear of being thought unpatriotic. Afterward, this matter has long been eschewed as, in Gary Nash’s apt phrase, “the revolution’s dirty secret.”
3. Black Patriots as the best American soldiers
Free blacks and slaves fought in every American battle. Initially, George Washington sought to discourage black recruitment. But he soon realized that Lord Dunmore’s strength might grow against him, “like a snowball in rolling,” and become an avalanche. It was thus military competition which produced a major impetus to recruit black Patriots.
In 1778, Governor James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island wrote to Washington that he could not find enough recruits among whites and wanted to form a black regiment. Washington agreed. Promising to purchase the freedom of black volunteers, the governor formed the First Rhode Island Regiment of some 250 blacks and Narragansett Indians. Most militiamen fought for only nine months. In contrast, these Rhode Island soldiers, who did not desert or were not killed, fought for five years. They became, as Baron von Closen, Washington’s advisor, observed in the march to Yorktown in 1781, “the most neatly dressed,the best under arms and the most precise in maneuvers” among Patriot soldiers. Another black unit was recruited in Connecticut and another in Massachusetts. According to von Closen, these composed one-quarter of the American forces at Yorktown.
In 1855, the black abolitionist Henry Nell reported in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution that 5,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Patriots. This number has been echoed by American historians ever since. But multiracial protest has finally forced the Daughters of the American Revolution, hesitantly, to count. In their 2008 Forgotten Patriots, Brianna L. Diaz and Hollis L. Gentry list by name 6,600 black and indigenous soldiers. Their dedication is to known and unknown nonwhite Patriots. With more research, this number will increase.
4. That genuine freedom is freedom for all
The revolutionary struggle in the United States was led by sailors and artisans, black and white, slave and free. It produced gradual emancipation in the North. It also inspired a deeper sense of liberty from below. For instance, General Washington had promised farmer recruits that their lands would be there when they returned. But soldiers from the Northeast came back to find their farms threatened with seizure for debt by banks. Led by Captain Daniel Shays, they rebelled in 1786-87.
These soldier-farmers of Western Massachusetts also protested the Constitution because it sanctioned bondage. Here are the words of three of these men in The Hampshire Gazette. As Consider Arms (a pseudonym), Malachi Maynard and Samuel Field put it,
“Where is the man who under the influence of sober, dispassionate reasoning, and not void of natural affection, can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery? We presume that man is not to be found amongst us: And yet we think the consequence is fairly drawn that this is what every man should be able to say who voted for this constitution.”
Their words prefigure John Rawls’s later modeling of an original position in which a moral judgment is one that empathically puts ourselves in the position of “the least advantaged.” The ardor of revolutionary soldiers like John Laurens extended this vision even into South Carolina. The movement that created gradual emancipation in the North would eventually explode bondage and, a century later, segregation in the South. As Black Lives Matter and Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s powerful dissent this June in Utah v. Strieff show, the fight for a decent, multiracial America continues to this moment. The long struggle before, during and after the Revolution on the Patriot side was a great and heroic beginning, and deserves, at last, to be widely known.
Alan Gilbert is John Evans Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and author of Black Patriots and Loyalists; Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence, University of Chicago Press, 2012 and “Slave-gangs, Press-gangs and Emancipation in the American Revolution.”
H/t Jesse Lemisch, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh.
The issue of The War on Women is happening all over the world. It looks different in every country but it still exists everywhere: it is still the disrespect and even hatred of women by men.
In America, it is pay inequality and the glass ceiling. It is also the fact that we are the only citizens who are not legally equal.
Often women are not given an education, and in some countries, women’s bodies are controlled and the government decides if they have children and how many. In other countries, a wife is immolated upon the briar of her dead husband. In some other countries, girls and women are sold because the family is too poor and there is not enough food. In yet other countries, female genital mutilation is performed to make a girl marriageable and to ensure she will not enjoy sex; in others, acid is thrown in a girl’s face to disfigure her because she said no to a young man; and in some a woman is killed in a so-called honor killing to save face for the family. In some countries, men buy little girls to have sex with them because they are pedophiles.
Think about it. It is the most disgusting list of crimes. I can barely think of a more despicable list. Fathers, Brothers, Uncles, Grandfathers look the other way; some participate; some organize the events. Misogyny has existed for many millennia and I realize it will not go away over night. But we must stand up to it. We must speak out. We must do whatever we can to help each woman who is being used, sold or brutalized.
Turning the world light on each incident is a good place to begin. Pressuring police in various countries to arrest and courts to convict perpetrators is also a righteous action.
Women, stand up for each other. Feminist men, stand up, speak up and be the brave souls we know you are and help women everywhere to become free, to live free and to pass that on to their daughters.
Namaste,
Barbara
Pakistan police arrest 14 in ‘honor killing’ of teen said to have helped bride to elope
Pakistan police arrest 14 in ‘honor killing’ of teen said to have helped bride to elope
Pakistani police escort blindfolded suspects accused of killing and setting fire to a teen girl to a court in Abbottabad on Thursday. (Shakeel Ahmed/AFP/Getty Images)
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — More than a dozen leaders of a small village in northwestern Pakistan were arrested Thursday and charged with burning a teenage girl to death because she helped one of her friends elope, security officials said.The crime, which is renewing attention on Pakistan’s horrific record of protecting women and children from abuse, took place on the outskirts of Abbottabad in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.Khurram Rasheed, police chief for the northern district of Abbottabad, said Thursday that the body of Ambreen Riasat was found in a burned van in the tourist resort of Donga Gali on April 29, the Associated Press reported. Her exact age was in dispute.A graphic photo of the teenager’s charred remains quickly circulated online. It appeared as though the girl’s arms had been bound before she was set on fire.Initially, police suspected that she may have been raped by a scorned boyfriend or as part of a family dispute. But Saeed Wazir, the regional police chief in Abbottabad, said Thursday that the killing was a “pre-planned act” involving 14 village leaders. Wazir said the entire village council had sanctioned the act to send a message to other minors.“They said she must be burnt alive to make a lesson for other girls,” he said.In an act of defiance against Pakistan’s strict Islamic and paternal customs, Wazir said, the victim had helped one of her friends secretly marry her boyfriend. The bride “didn’t obey her father’s will and did a love marriage at court with a guy,” he said.
After the bride’s father found out, he requested that village elders investigate. In many parts of Pakistan, women and girls are expected to receive their father’s consent before marrying.
The village elders called a meeting, which is referred to as a Jirga. Under Pashtun culture in Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan, such gatherings are often held to try to reach consensus on how best to resolve local disputes. At times, the meetings also become a form of street justice.
According to Wazir, the village elders investigating the marriage quickly discovered that the victim had helped her friend evade her father’s will. The elders decided the victim needed to be punished for not disclosing her role in the marriage.
Several men then dragged the teenager out of her house and tied her into the van, Wazir said.
“Despite the requests and pleas from her parents, villagers forcibly brought her out and set her afire while roping her to the seat of the vehicle,” he said.
Both the leader of the Jirga and the father of the newlywed girl were arrested, Wazir said. A dozen other men who participated in the Jirga also were charged, he added.
It was not immediately clear whether the new bride or her husband were punished.
The case represents a troublesome expansion of mob-like tactics that women can face in Pakistan when they disobey their parents or extended family members.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 8,694 girls and women have died in so-called honor killings here between 2004 and 2015. Those crimes involved revenge killings for dishonoring a family, village or local custom.
About one-fourth of those cases involved the death of a minor. Although most common in remote areas, honor killings still occur in Pakistan even in larger, more progressive cities. The problem was highlighted recently in the Oscar-winning film “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness.”
The documentary profiles a 18-year-old woman who was beaten and shot by her father and uncle in Punjab province after she married a man against their wishes. The woman, Saba, survived. Her father and uncle were arrested but later freed, according to HBO Documentary Films.
After he saw the film, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to end honor killings.
Earlier this year, Sharif’s political party, Pakistan Muslim League-N, pushed through a women’s rights bill in Punjab province. The legislation, strongly opposed by the religious community, establishes a 24-hour domestic abuse hotline and network of shelters offering housing, first aid and counseling for women.
Still, a horrific wave of abuse continues.
On Sunday, Punjab police arrested a man and charged him with killing his wife, who was seven months pregnant, the Express Tribune newspaper reported. Using a club, the man apparently beat the woman to death after she refused to allow him to take a second wife.
Also in Punjab over the weekend, a man tossed acid onto a 37-year-old woman, resulting in burns over 30 percent of her body. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that the woman’s nephew is the main suspect. The man apparently wanted to marry one of the woman’s daughters – his cousin — but was refused.
“He was annoyed with his maternal aunt for turning down his marriage proposal,” Azhar Akram, a police officer in Multan, told Dawn.
The link above will take you to a video that will discuss the girls still missing. If you are not aware, approximately two years ago, a terrorist group called Boko Haram, took girls from their schools. Why girls? Because this terrorist group does not want females to be educated. They want them as wives for their soldiers and they want to sell them into slavery or human trafficking. Some girls were able to escape but the majority are under the watchful eye of Boko Haram.
Two Years Later, Women in Congress Fight to #BringBackOurGirls
bySHANNON CLASHandHALIMAH ABDULLAH
On Congresswoman Fredericka Wilson’s website a clock counted down the days, hours, seconds and minutes since terrorists tore through the village of Chibok, Nigeria and ripped 200 schoolgirls from their community in a violent rampage that shocked the world.
Thursday marked two years to the day. And, just as the social media hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, galvanized a global community — including First Lady Michelle Obama — to raise their voices in a collective outcry against such brutality, Wilson, a Florida Democrat is hoping to harness the power of social media to address “the security and humanitarian crisis in the region.” She is hosting a ‘Twitterstorm” on Thursday to refocus attention on the horrors the terrorist group has continued to inflict on West Africa and the plight of the missing schoolgirls.
“Social media is a powerful tool. It has the ability to reach millions of people,” Wilson told NBC News. “After we began the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, the world started to take notice.”
Wilson, a former teacher and school principal, plans to Tweet until every girl is found. And she urges everyone to “Tweet prayers, pictures of remembrance, blessings for the families and words of consolation” to commemorate the anniversary for the girls’ abduction.
Women in Congress have been especially vocal on behalf of the missing girls.
Just before Mother’s Day in 2014, every female lawmaker in Congress signed letters to President Barack Obama urging his administration to push the U.N. Security Council to add Boko Haram to an al Qaeda Sanctions List. The list was aimed at requiring members to freeze the assets of anyone affiliated with Boko Haram and prevent them from crossing their borders.
The U.N. Security Council added Boko Haram to the list later that month. This week the State Department reiterated its support for the safe return of all those taken by Boko Haram, a terrorist organization with ties to ISIS, which has kidnapped and killed thousands of people in Nigerian territories and neighboring countries for more than seven years. The Obama administration has offered support through intelligence gathering, financial assistance and psychological aid to Nigeria in its efforts to push back against the terrorist group and help victims recover.
“Unfortunately there have been thousands of people kidnapped in Nigeria,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said on Thursday adding that the Nigerian government is ultimately responsible for the effort to find the girls. Organizations, such as Amnesty International, say more could be done.
“We have tried to push the Obama administration to press for genuine, transparent reform within the Nigerian military when it considers providing security assistance and we have also worked with other NGOs and members of congress to make sure that the situation is not brushed (aside) and forgotten,” Adotei Akwei, managing director of government relations at Amnesty International USA told NBC News.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees recently announced that over the last few months more than 135,000 people from Cameroon, Chad and Niger have fled to escape Boko Haram.
More than 2.5 million have been forced from their homes.
One million children have been forced from school causing 2,000 schools to close.
As many as 20,000 people have been killed, 2,000 of which were killed in January’s massacre in the city of Baga.
This week relatives of some of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls gathered in Abuja to watch a recently released proof-of-life video that appeared to show 15 of the students. The bittersweet moment was made all the more so, parents told members of the media, because they have not been reunited with their children.
In the U.S., a chorus of congressional women have continued to raise their voices against Boko Haram’s atrocities.
Over the past two years, female lawmakers and their male counterparts have taken to the floor to speak about the kidnapping and remind those listening of the perils of the rise of terrorist group. Wilson is hoping that lawmakers will make one-minute speeches each week and help support appropriations to help the female victims of Boko Haram.
Many of the women in Congress have also worn red on Wednesdays to remind the world that the girls are still missing.
And several of the lawmakers, including Wilson, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Florida and were joined by Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas in meeting with some of the Chibok schoolgirls who escaped.
About 50 girls managed to escape soon after they were abducted. More than 200 remain missing.
Related: Boko Haram’s Use of Child ‘Suicide’ Bombers Skyrocketed Last Year: U.N.
The tales of the survivors of Boko Haram attacks are chilling.
“Boko Haram captured a village in Northern Nigera and killed the mother and father of a young boy and girl. Later, the insurgents debated on whether or not to kill the boy. After speculating that the young boy would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a Christian pastor, the insurgents decided to kill the boy,” Wilson said. “
The little girl was tied on top of the bodies of her family and left for dead. She was rescued three days later.
Wilson says she will continue to press the United States and Nigerian governments to work together to help end these atrocities.
Kenyan activists shout slogans during a demonstration to protest against kidnapping of Nigerian school girls by Nigeria’s Islamist militant group Boko Haram, in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 15. DAI KUROKAWA / EPA file Though the Nigerian government claims it has nearly defeated Boko Haram attacks continue — especially on vulnerable communities.
“It represents the world’s failure to stand up to terrorism and stand for our civilization,” said Emmanuel Ogebe, an international human rights lawyer that works with the escaped schoolgirls. Combat operations and intelligence efforts must continue to pressure these groups, said Malcolm Nance, executive director of Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies, a think tank in Hudson, New York.
Once captured, the women are exploited sexually and face mental abuse. There have also been reports that some of the kidnapped women and girls have been used in suicide attacks.
“These women are victims of gang rape and humiliation, then told that they can only redeem themselves in god’s eyes through “martyrdom” via suicide bombing,” Nance said.
Nance said the mass abductions in Chibok and other places in the region are a critical recruiting strategy to attract young men. “(Boko Haram) promises women and children to their fighters in exchange for their willingness to attack and mass murder their own people,” Nance said.
In his work at the Education Must Continue Initiative, a organization that works to help victimized children in northeastern Nigeria, Ogebe has witnessed depression and Stockholm Syndrome among the young victims.
“Some women abused by terrorists in the faux marriages have shown sympathy towards them after their rescue by the (Nigerian) army,” he said.
At one relief camp, the rescued women were unfriendly to relief teams that brought them supplies. The military found out they were still in contact with their captors and were moved to an undisclosed location, Ogebe said.
Still, there are glimmers of progress.
Ogebe said his organization helped a teen named Dela, one of the recovered Chibok schoolgirls, begin college. After a series of delays from funding to the snow blizzard this past winter, she will continue the education she was stolen from after 660 days in captivity, he said.
Stories like that reinforce for Wilson why it’s important to remember what happened.
“We must never forget what happened to the girls along with Boko Haram’s other victims,” she said.
2 Years After #BringBackOurGirls, Boko Haram Is Still Attacking Schools
Since 2009, Boko Haram has destroyed over 900 schools and forced at least 1,500 to close.
In this photo taken Monday, Dec. 7, 2015, children displaced by Boko Haram during an attack on their villages receive lectures in a camp in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Attacks by Islamic extremist group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria and neighboring countries have forced more than 1 million children out of school, heightening the risk they will be abused, abducted or recruited by armed groups, the United Nations children’s agency said Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2015. (AP Photo/ Sunday Alamba)
Today marks two years since Boko Haram abducted more than 270 girls from a school in northeast Nigeria. Since then, millions more children have been affected by the conflict — most notably by being kept out of school.
Boko Haram’s violence has caused nearly one million children in Northeast Nigeria alone to have little or no access to education, according to a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. Since 2009, the militant group has been attacking schools, teachers and students, terrorizing the local education system.
“We didn’t know what was going on, we just felt the blast,” said Hassan, a 14-year-old boy who was injured in a suicide attack on his school, in a video from HRW. “I tried to stand up and fell because my leg was no more.”
Hassan’s legs were injured when a Boko Haram suicide bomber blew himself up during his school assembly, according to the video. The young boy was unable to attend school for more than a year, because he didn’t have a wheelchair.
Boko Haram’s attacks have destroyed more than 900 schools and forced at least 1,500 more to close since 2009, according to the HRW report. The attacks are aimed at what the militants call “Western” education, or non-Quranic schools.
More than 600 teachers have been killed and another 19,000 forced to flee. The group has abducted more than 2,000 people, including many students.
“In its brutal crusade against western-style education, Boko Haram is robbing an entire generation of children in northeast Nigeria of their education,” said Mausi Segun, a Nigeria researcher in an HRW article. “The government should urgently provide appropriate schooling for all children affected by the conflict.”
PIUS UTOMI EKPEI VIA GETTY IMAGES
A child sits along the road at night to sell his wares in Nigeria. Many children in the north have little choice, with schools closed or destroyed by six years of fighting between Boko Haram and the military. Experts warn that Nigeria needs to take urgent action to prevent an entire generation of children missing out on education.
The militants aren’t the only ones placing schools at risk: Nigerian government security forces who are fighting them have also used schools for military purposes, according to HRW, placing the institutions at heightened risk of attack.
“It is up to both sides to immediately stop the attacks on education,” Segun said in the HRW article, “and end the cycle of poverty and underachievement to which far too many children in the region are being sentenced.”
The conflict has reached beyond Nigeria’s borders to also dramatically affect the education systems in Cameroon, Chad and Niger, which were already fragile, according to a Unicef report.
– VIA GETTY IMAGES
Children press for the release of 219 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram, on April 14, 2015. Nigeria’s president cautioned he could not make promises on the return of the schoolgirls, as the country marked the first anniversary of their abduction.
Most people remember the abduction of over 270 schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria on April 14, 2014, after which people worldwide took to Twitter demanding their return with #BringBackOurGirls.
What many don’t know is that since then, at least 1.3 million children, have been displaced by Boko Haram’s violence across four countries, according to Unicef. It is one of the fastest growing displacement crises in Africa.
Since the notorious abductions in 2014, the group’s violence has only increased. Thousands more children have disappeared, with little international attention paid to it. In 2015 alone, the number of suicide attacks rose from 32 to 151, the report said, including an alarming rise in suicide attacks by children.
In order to address the humanitarian crisis, Unicef has scaled up its operations in the region, but due to insufficient funding and difficult access from insecurity,thousands of children have still not been able to receive the assistance they need.
“The challenge we face is to keep children safe without interrupting their schooling,” said Manuel Fontaine, a Unicef director, in a statement in December. “Schools have been targets of attack, so children are scared to go back to the classroom; yet the longer they stay out of school, the greater the risks of being abused, abducted and recruited by armed groups.”
A young man demonstrates for the return of the girls. We must all use our voices. These young women and girls are voiceless!
Girls kidnapped from their school are now suffering from forced marriages, rape and unwanted pregnancy. And let us not forget some of them are being human trafficked.
Pictures of the original girls who were stolen from their school. Please notice how young many of them are.
Nigerian families continue to grieve and demand that their daughters be returned. The problem is that the ones that are impregnated when they return are ostracised.
Mensen maken de samenleving en nemen daarin een positie in. Deze website geeft toegang tot een diversiteit aan artikelen die gaan over 'samenleven', belicht vanuit verschillende perspectieven. De artikelen hebben gemeen dat er gezocht wordt naar wat 'mensen bindt, in plaats van wat hen scheidt'.
idealisticrebel 