Girls Deserve Better - and not just in Nigeria
BY PRACHI VIDWANS MAY 16, 2014
Four weeks have passed since Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group in Nigeria, kidnapped hundreds of high school girls from their dormitory beds. 276 of the girls currently remain in their clutches. In a video released in early May, a Boko Haram militant said they planned to "sell in the market" and "give their hands in marriage." The scale and audacity of this attack makes it especially shocking, and the case has triggered an extraordinary outpouring of indignation across the globe -- on a scale that isn't necessarily typical in cases involving violence against women. As FP commentator Lauren Wolfe observed in her recent article, women are often abducted in conflicts around the world without generating much of an international reaction. And as the New York Times recently pointed out, Boko Haram's ransom video suggests that the group itself has been surprised by the degree of global outrage.
The militants, indeed, don't seem to have any pronounced sense that they're doing anything wrong. "This is a place that is very conservative about women's roles," says Sally Engle Merry, a professor of anthropology and law at New York University. "The extremists may have assumed that girls were relatively powerless and unimportant." The idea that girls cannot make their own choices was taken for granted. To the militants, kidnapping is not radical: Education is.
It's important to stress that these men are extremists who don't represent northern Nigeria as a whole. Yet it's hard to imagine their actions outside of a context where young women are seen as incapable of deciding their own fates. In Nigeria, according to a 2013 Ford Foundation survey, 39 percent of girls are married off before the age of 18, and in 2009, 26 percent of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were in polygamous unions. In general, child marriage has disastrous consequences: Victims of child marriage are more likely to suffer domestic violence, contract AIDS, and experience complications in birth and pregnancy. They are also far more likely to be illiterate, undereducated, and poor. The same study found that more girls are affected by child marriage in Nigeria than in the rest of West African countries put together, and that child marriage is most prevalent in the country's north. It's precisely to combat the widespread nature of this phenomenon that Nigerian activists have set out to build a network of programs that are making headway in combating the practice of child marriage -- especially in the north, and especially through education programming for girls. The fact that the abducted girls were in school is testament to that fact.
The Boko Haram attack is a particularly radical version of the various forms of coercion that are applied to girls in Nigeria, and across the world, every day -- and which all too often goes unnoticed and unreported. In some societies in South Asia and the Middle East, young women forced into marriage are punished and sometimes even killed when they resist the choices their families have made for them; such "honor crimes" typically only make the headlines when the consequences reverberate into Western countries unused to such practices. In this case, the victims are individuals, and the perpetrators are members of their own families (typically older brothers).
Read more at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/05/16/girls_deserve_better_and_not_just_in_nigeria?
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This is their wedding day. 
