Boko Haram Insurgency and Violence Against Women and Girls in Nigeria

Introduction

Insurgency is a global problem, not just peculiar to Nigeria. Their activities include bombing, disruptions in places of worship, killing of innocent people, abduction of girls and women, sexual abuse and rape, forced marriages and forced prostitution. Insurgency has caused a lot of trauma in the hearts of many Nigerians. As part of their activities, women and girls were sexually abused, raped, compelled into forced marriages, used as sex slaves and trafficking. Insurgency is an emotional issue, people differ on its definition, and interpretation of facts in specific cases of insurgency activity. Noam (1991) maintains that there are two different approaches to the issue of insurgency. The first approach seeks a rational-scientific understanding of terrorism as a social phenomenon with specific empirical causal factors which lead to particular societal impact. The second approach prefers to view terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power.

Merriam-Webster (2006) defines insurgency as a violent attempt to take control of a government, a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as beneficiary. It ranges across a wide spectrum of organizations, circumstances and beliefs and not a single coherent phenomenon. According to the United States’ Department of Defence, insurgency is the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious or ideological. Inherent in this definition are the three key elements of violence, fear, and intimidation. The American Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) defines insurgency as the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. The United States, state Department on the other hand, understand it as the deployment of premeditated politically-motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. The British government, as far back as 1974, officially defined insurgency as the use of violence for political ends, and it includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public, or any section of the public, in fear.

Zenn and Pearson (2014), quoting Butler (1999) defines gender as socially constructed norms and roles both limiting and permitting the actions and expectations of men and women. The world health organization (WHO) defines gender based violence as physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Gender based violence can also be seen as the physical, sexual and psychological violence against both men and women that occurs within the family and the community, which is sometimes perpetrated by the state but not always condoned by the state (Bouta, Frerks and Bannon; 2005). The Beijing Declaration and platform for action- a world conference on women- states that while the whole communities suffer the consequences of conflict and terrorism, women and girls are particularly affected because of their sex and their status in the society. (Sigsworth, 2008 p 4; cited in Carter, 2013). Gender based violence is a crime against individual and an act of aggression against the community and the nation. This paper focusses only on violence against women.

For the purpose of this paper, insurgency is defined as all forms of violent action by clandestine and semi-clandestine actors aimed at achieving criminal, military, religious, political or other objectives, with such actions often directed at government and non-combatant populations with the deliberate objective of spreading fear, anxiety and terror. In the Nigerian context therefore, one is susceptible to quest: what could be done to protect the lives of citizens especially the women? How does the violent act affect women? What implications does this have on the family, the society and the nation as a whole? In achieving this, the paper adopted content analysis relying on secondary sources of data which are generated through textbooks, newspapers, journals and publications from the internet. To begin with, there is need for some conceptual clarifications and this shall be considered in the next discussion.