Big News Network.com Monday 13th April, 2015
LAGOS, Nigeria - A new United Nations report presents a gut wrenching account of children in Nigeria with many being turned into human bombs, subjected to sexual abuse and forced marriage.
The "Missing Childhoods" report by the UNICEF records the impact of armed conflict on children in Nigeria and says the number of refugee children has "more than doubled in the past year, reaching 800,000".
The report says that over 1.5 million people have fled their homes due to the Boko Haram violence. About half of those are children, it said.
"This includes 1.2 million displaced inside Nigeria and around 200,000 who have crossed into neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger after their villages were attacked or threatened."
The report highlights that over 880,000 are staying with host communities "with little access to humanitarian support, putting additional strains on already stretched health, education and social services".
"Children have become deliberate targets, often subjected to extreme violence from sexual abuse and forced marriage to kidnappings and brutal killings."
In more nauseating accounts, the report says, "children have also become weapons, made to fight alongside armed groups and at times used as human bombs, including a case of young girl sent to her death with a bomb strapped to her chest in Maiduguri."
The report was released on the eve of the anniversary of the mass abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the rural town of Chibok on April 14, 2014. Most of those girls are still in captivity.
"The abduction of more than 200 girls in Chibok is only one of endless tragedies being replicated on an epic scale across Nigeria," Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF's regional director for West and Central Africa, said in a statement.
"Children as young as four years old are being used within the ranks of Boko Haram as cooks, porters and look-outs," the report says.
Citing accounts by "escapees", it says that "young women and girls who have been abducted have been subjected to forced marriage, forcible religious conversion, physical and psychological abuse, forced labour and rape".
"In addition, children have reportedly been recruited by vigilante groups fighting against Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria."
It says that students and teachers have also been deliberate targets. More than 300 schools have been damaged or destroyed and at least 196 teachers and 314 schoolchildren killed by the end of 2014, according to the report.
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