Ten years ago, the world was horrified when the radical Islamic group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 young girls from a school in Chibok, a town in northern Nigeria. Though many eventually returned home, about 80 haven’t been seen since.
That horrifying story has a shocking sequel: Some of the Chibok girls who escaped or were released have found their lives as bad or worse than when they were in captivity. “I do regret coming back,” one of them, who gave birth to two children while held hostage in a Nigerian forest, said earlier this year.
Hindered by limited resources and an underdeveloped theology of trauma and abuse, the Nigerian church has failed to address the needs of actual and potential victims and to provide protection, justice, trauma care, and healing. Because much of this work requires strategic leadership training and empowerment, we Nigerian Christians covet the partnership of Christians outside Nigeria, who, like the whole world, were once captivated by this mass kidnapping but now rarely remember us.
The appalling consequences of interreligious conflict in the region are not new. In 1797, Muslim extremists abducted Neali, a 13-year-old girl. Taken along the infamous Hayan Yaki, the “war road” where Fulani jihadists terrorized non-Muslim villages, Neali faced a brutal, foodless, and waterless trek. “Her captors beat her severely when she became frail from exhaustion. Eventually, she was abandoned in the wilderness, where wild animals devoured her. Missionary explorer Karl Kumm, who documented the story, wrote, “Both slaves and animals are hunted in Africa.” One of the most vulnerable groups that often suffer from human hunting is the female children, like Neali.
More than two centuries later, modern-day survivors reflect on new chapters of excruciating trauma. Earlier this year, Hauwa Ishaya, a Chibok abduction survivor, shared, “If I remember my sisters that are still there [in captivity], I am not happy sometimes. Sometimes I am crying because they are still there. I am not hearing anything about them again. People are not talking about them again. I feel bad.”
Amina Ali, who was forced into marriage and impregnated by a Boko Haram soldier, lamented, “There was a time she [Ali daughter] came from school, crying, and she asked me that, ‘Mommy, is it true that I’m a child of Boko Haram?’”
Ishaya and Ali’s words reveal deep, persisting emotional scars that government educational aid and secular counselling alone cannot heal. One would expect the church to assist in the holistic reintegration of these girls, addressing both their emotional wounds and the cultural shame they face as survivors of sexual violence. Instead, the church adds to the problem in two main ways: by forgetting the victims and, sometimes, incredibly, by blaming them.
When a kidnapping occurs, Nigerian churches respond with fervent prayer and fundraise for the bereaved—for about three weeks. Then they move on.
I saw this pattern when one of the students I taught at the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) Theological Seminary Igbaja, Kuyet Shammah, was killed by terrorists four years ago. At first, people organized protests and mourned publicly. But Nigerians generally do not hold annual memorial events to remember the victims of tragedies as many other cultures do. As a result, the suffering of family members and other survivors is not sensitively honored.
Forgetting is bad, but blaming is even worse. Similar to Jesus’ disciples in John 9:1–2, many Nigerians, especially those in Pentecostal traditions, attribute misfortune to personal sin. They think that the victims of social ills such as abduction must have sinned to bring these misfortunes upon themselves and that the only proper response is prayer and repentance. On many occasions, the only thing many church leaders have been willing to do when Christian families are terrorized is to pray. No sustained, meaningful action follows.
Not all kidnappings in northern Nigeria are related to Islamic extremism. As John Joseph Hayab, a Christian leader in the city of Kaduna, has pointed out, multiple interconnected factors drive the kidnapping crisis.
“We must differentiate those with a religious agenda from those simply looking for food,” he explained. Some attacks are “mainly to convert people,” but others are just “for money.” When the perpetrators want money, they can kidnap Christians or Muslims, collect the money, and go. As for killing, Hayab said, they restrict that to Christians.
Boko Haram makes no effort to conceal its sinister motivations, using extremist ideology to justify its mission to spread an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, including firm rejection of female education. Boko Haram leader Shekau infamously declared that he would “marry out a female at 12,” referring to the Chibok girls kidnapped in 2014, and justified his actions by citing Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha. (Although there are different views on the issue, some believe that Muhammad married Aisha when she was only six and use this example to justify marrying underage females.)
The perpetrators are indoctrinated into an absolutist worldview that sees violating innocent girls’ dignity as a weapon of warfare. Muhammad Alli, a former Boko Haram fighter involved in girls’ kidnapping, confessed, “At the time I married them, I did not feel any guilt. … But when I decided to surrender, I realized how awful they must have felt being forced to do these things.”
Kashim Shettima, former governor of Borno state, observed, “The sect leaders made a conscious effort to impregnate the women.” He added that some “even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology.”
Overcoming this level of cruelty requires a strategic and systemic approach. West African missionary history provides a powerful example of a positive response to the scourge of female child abduction. During the colonial era, children rescued from slavery and trafficking faced minimal rehabilitation opportunities, with many dying or becoming blind. Some were forced into marriage or prostitution because they lacked any means of survival and could not find or recognize their families, having been abducted at such a young age. In response, the Sudan United Mission (SUM) and the organization then called Sudan Interior Mission (now SIM) partnered with British administrators to provide care and establish freed-slave homes and boarding schools.
By 1925, SUM’s home had rehabilitated 5,000 children. Their strategy combined spiritual, psychological, and medical dimensions of care and meeting basic needs for food, clothing, and training. Many of the young children rehabilitated by SUM and SIM became part of the community’s first generation of educated and respected elites. These mission agencies started from a stance of unconditional acceptance, treating the freed girls as important to the future of Nigeria despite their unfortunate experiences.
How can similarly effective ministry occur through the Nigerian church today? The first step is to stop stigmatizing women who were forced to have nonconsensual extramarital sex, that is, sexual assault. John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted, “There is law, and then there is social custom, and social custom is much stronger than law in many parts of Nigeria.” In some of Africa’s conservative denominations, social custom makes any woman who has had a pregnancy out of wedlock permanently ineligible for a church wedding—even if a Boko Haram rapist forcefully impregnated the woman.
After their release or escape from captivity, these women are still being perceived as unclean rather than finding comfort and healing in their community. Moreover, many Nigerians continue to discourage female education and promote early arranged marriages for Nigerian girls, thereby facilitating gender injustice and patterns of domestic violence.
Churches that do want to welcome survivors can make trauma counseling a priority. Few Nigerians have access to counseling other than on marital issues, and most African seminaries do not train pastors in trauma-counseling skills. For cultural reasons, many Africans do not consider counseling a significant career and instead take an uninformed, essentially trial-and-error approach to assisting people in emotional need. Christians outside Africa could assist by offering high-quality training opportunities to empower African church leaders in this area.
The Nigerian church could also improve its partnership efforts with government. With foreign donor support, the national government agreed to pay the American University of Nigeria (founded by a former vice president of the country) $350,000 a year to educate former Boko Haram abductees. But only three girls have earned degrees in ten years, and many of them have said the initiative failed in its education and professional aspirations because it failed to consider their background. Amina Ali, one of the girls confessed: “we didn’t choose AUN because we know the school standards are difficult for us, we girls come from poor backgrounds. The former minister forced us to come to this school.” Church leaders often have a more solidly grounded grassroots perspective. They could become partners in making the education of the released girls more effective and fostering emotional and spiritual healing.
Another key weakness in the church’s response is its inability to build strategic alliances with moderate Muslims who oppose Islamic extremism, largely because the church’s stereotyping of Muslims has hindered its ability to collaborate with them. When Nigerian Christians speak out of emotion and anger about Muslims, they add to the problem. The Nigerian church needs to develop a more accurate understanding of its Muslim neighbors, many of whom want to end the violence and reject Islamic terrorism as much as the church does. If we as church members join hands with moderate Muslims in public advocacy, we can achieve much more than if we treat them as if they were all terrorists.
The global church can best help Nigeria and other countries where Christians are threatened by shifting its support emphasis from providing handouts to building grassroots capacity, including training and empowering indigenous Christian activists who can advocate effectively with the government and engage relevant stakeholders. An indigenized advocacy program is more sustainable than foreign cash. At this point, few, if any, Christians in Nigeria are adequately equipped to gather details on incidents of hostility and to use the information to advocate for change.
The church should be a safe place where kidnapped girls and other victims can make sense of their experiences. In the past, Nigerian churches have welcomed and listened sensitively to the testimonies of some repentant witches. We should certainly do the same for former Boko Haram girls who cry every time they think of their friends who are still in custody. We can listen to and document their stories, honor their suffering, and show that the faithfulness of those who refused to renounce their faith in Christ is not in vain.
The world today knows Nigeria as one of the most dangerous countries to be a Christian. With focused attention and global support, Nigeria could become known as a place where the church is a transformational source of healing.
Godwin Adeboye (Ph.D.) is a pastor and theologian with Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), a Nigerian denomination.
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