The world seems to have forgotten about the Chibok Girls. Then, every now and then, an article pops up with news of hope. They’re still missing, people. Married off, raped and enslaved—yet, I’m told we don’t need feminism. I hear the background noise of those uncomfortable with women having rights, muttering about how it happens to boys and men. Odd, that. I don’t hear anything about Chibok boys being taken. No, indeed. In fact, men are seen as the most unwanted, unless they can be recruited into the terrorist groups. No. They want the women and girls. They want them to marry and enslave and rape. Women are considered inferior, only existing for making heirs and providing pleasure. The woman’s opinion in all this is A-1 shit.
These young women and girls are forever changed. I am not sure how anyone comes to this topic with the idea that well it happens to boys too as a help. It doesn’t help in the least. It shuts down the conversation about the sex trade, violence against women worldwide and basic civil rights of half the human population.
Women have a far greater chance of being sexually assaulted than men. That is a fact. The lack of reporting still doesn’t even out those numbers. The disparity between reports would logically hold true. Men are not oppressed, at least not like women are. That is something that we’re going to have to accept if we’re going to address issues like this and make a change in the cultures across the globe, so that there are no more women traded as slaves, kidnapped and raped.
You can claim to be a humanist all you want, but ignoring the truth that women are several times more likely to become a victim of violence doesn’t go away. All this does is ignore that truth, sweep it under the rug and allow you to go back to your privileged lives—especially the men.
Furthermore, I am exhausted by the claims that this is Islamic doctrine straight from their sacred texts. This is NOT Islam. If we’re going to blame Islam for this, then we need to blame Christianity equally. That is an uncomfortable truth. Christianity is no more innocent than Islam by these standards. How soon we forget. It’s so easy to other Muslims and people of color, because it puts everything into a neat little box—except that it doesn’t. Boxing things up with this lack of reasoning only creates more conflict and extends the legacy of bigotry handed down to the next generations.
Can we stop blaming religion for violence? Because it is a human thing and it will be enabled by any construct which humanity can manipulate to their own bitter ends. Atheists are not immune. Agnostics are not immune. The devout are not immune. Religion and secularism do not protect us from the monsters within.
The conversation needs to return to the matter of the girls and women who were abducted, enslaved and raped; and, what we’re going to do about that. Please, do not say I will pray for them, because prayers will achieve nothing, just as proposing to dismantle a religion will do nothing. This kind of evil, what these militant monsters did, is a disease fed by the psychopathology of the human mind—religion or not, they’d do it anyway because that is what is in their minds to do. A discussion on anything other than how to get them back is a waste of air that only shuts down the conversation.
Wonderful news out of Nigeria. 241 Women and girls freed.
