In Northeast Nigeria, sexual violence is a characteristic of the ongoing insurgency, during which thousands of women and girls have been kidnapped and raped by Islamic extremist group Boko Haram. Many are forcibly married to their captors and become pregnant from rape. Some have managed to escape or have been rescued and allowed to return to their almost completely destroyed villages to try to rebuild their lives.
But for many of these women—like Esther from the West African town of Gwoza in southern Borno State—the persecution doesn’t end. They return to their village only to face discrimination and rejection by family and their community who label them “Boko Haram women.” Their children, conceived from rape, face an even greater risk of rejection, abandonment and violence.
For a year, Esther was held captive by Boko Haram militants. Her captivity left her with deep emotional wounds and a child she named Rebecca—the baby others in her family and village call “Boko.” Here, Esther shares her story as her baby daughter looks into the camera, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this world can be an extremely cruel place.
The last thing 17-year-old Esther remembers seeing the day her world turned upside down was her father’s collapsed body lying lifeless on the ground.
Before that October day, Esther and her father lived a pretty simple life after her mother passed away. She attended school and took care of her ailing father as best she could.
In October 2015, everything changed when Islamic extremist group Boko Haram (which translates “non-Islamic education is a sin”) struck her town. When the first gunshots rang out, followed by harrowing screams, Esther and her father ran to escape. It was too late—the attackers had already surrounded their house.
The rebel militants struck down her father and left him in a heap on the ground. Esther became a Boko Haram captive. As rebel fighters carried off her and several other young women in the town to their hideout in the Sambisa Forest (where Boko Haram drove thousands of those they kidnapped), she continued to look back, her eyes fixed on her father. Esther doesn’t know if he survived or died that day.
She assumes the worst.
AN UNIMAGINABLE NIGHTMARE
Life in the hands of Boko Haram was the worst nightmare Esther could ever imagine. There in the Sambisa Forest, the terrorists employed diverse tactics to coerce the kidnapped girls to renounce their faith in Christ and swear their allegiance to Allah, the Muslim God. When enticement with privileges didn’t work, they quickly resorted to violence.
Many of the girls could not resist and married their captors, Esther says.
Esther also fought extreme pressure. The militants found her beautiful; many wanted her as their wife. However, Esther, like her namesake in the Bible (Esther 4:16), determined to not give in.
In her heart, she decided: If I perish, I perish. But I will not become a Muslim.
Her resolve was no doubt courageous, but it also wreaked dire consequences. Trying to hide the tears trickling over her cheeks, Esther looks down as she recalls how she was continually raped.
“I cannot count how many men raped me. Every time they came back from their attacks, they would rape us…defile us…”
She is silent as she attempts to regain control over her emotions.
“Each passing day, I hated myself more and more,” she says. “I felt that God had forsaken me. There were times when I was so angry with Him… Still, I could not get myself to renounce Him. I found myself remembering His promise to never leave me or forsake me.”
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UNENDING PERSECUTION
Eventually, Esther became pregnant. Who the father is, she does not know.
“I had no idea how on earth I would ever be able to love this child,” she says, remembering how she felt when she learned she was pregnant.
In November 2016, the Nigerian military rescued Esther and the other kidnapped girls in captivity. Esther came back to her village, pregnant, hoping to find support. Instead, many of the people in her community rejected and shunned the former captives, labeling her and others “Boko Haram women.”
Salamatu Umar knows that label all too well. She was also abducted by Boko Haram in 2015, when she was just 15, and was forced to marry a Boko Haram fighter. She and another girl eventually escaped their captors, running away while they were collecting firewood for cooking. Salamatu was pregnant at the time.
She is free—and yet continues to be wounded.
“People call me ‘Boko Haram wife’ to my face,” she told NPR. “They say I am the wife of a killer—so how can I be afraid of Boko Haram? They say my son is a Boko Haram baby.”
A February 2016 Unicef report sheds light on the stigma and the continued persecution of former Boko Haram captives when they return. The report indicates that villagers view these women, girls and their children as a direct threat, fearing that they have been indoctrinated and radicalized by their captors.
