Healing the young women harmed by Boko Haram
Unlike the Chibok schoolgirls for whom the #BringBackOurGirls campaign rallied, thousands of others garnered no headlines when they were abducted. All too often no one welcomes them home.
(The Christian Science Monitor) Fatima came close to killing her own son. Along the edge of the 18-year-old’s headscarf are scars running down the left side of her face and neck—scars from escaping Boko Haram militants in northeastern Nigeria.
“I did not like the boy in any way,” she said softly of her son, Mohammed. “I didn’t want to have eye contact or even see the child. I tried to murder him, to poison him. God must have intervened, because people wouldn’t have been powerful enough to stop me.”
Fatima (whose last name was withheld for her safety) told of her ordeal while sitting in a tent in Bakassi Camp for Internally Displaced Persons in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State and the birthplace of Boko Haram. When someone fetches Mohammed, now four years old, from school, Fatima’s face opens into a broad smile. She laughs as she swings him over her shoulder and tickles him, and he giggles with delight.
