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Girls as young as 13 still getting raped by security officers in camps

It's hardly news that security operatives in charge of camps have been carrying out several alleged acts of sexual abuse.
14-year-old Falmata has been raped repeatedly by Boko Haram fighters and Nigerian soldiers

When Nigerian girls as young as 13 are not getting strapped with bombs by Boko Haram to carry out suicide bombings, they're getting raped by security officers in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps.
It's hardly a new revelation that security operatives in charge of camps have been carrying out several alleged acts of sexual abuse on young girls and women they've been sworn to protect.

It's a topic that's reared its ugly head over and over again with hardly any tangible solution to end the abominable acts.

According to a recent report by the New York Times (NYT), it's a practice that continues with even more stories of woes told by helpless victims who are mostly widows and unaccompanied orphans.
A young girl at an IDP camp in Riyom Local Government Area in Plateau state

Widespread rape of girls in IDP camps
Before she was unfortunate enough to be taken to an IDP camp in Maiduguri, 14-year-old Falmata had been kidnapped by Boko Haram from her home when she was only a primary school pupil.

For the next three years, she was married off to a string of militants and had already lost a baby few days after birth before she even became a teenager. After a fortuitous escape, she ran into soldiers who took her to the Dalori Camp in Maiduguri.

The same day after her arrival in the camp that was supposed to be her refuge from years of awful abuse, she was raped by two soldiers only hours apart.

"They did it one after another. I'm not even sure those two knew about each other," she said.

After two gruelling months of being raped by different security officers, Falmata fled again for her dear life in search of her family in Maiduguri, lonely and penniless.

"I felt it would continue forever," she said.

Contrary to what the top brass of the army and other security agencies in charge at IDP camps would like to make you believe, Falmata's case is not an isolated one.

In a camp called Teachers Village, security operatives have fashioned out a well-known system to target girls and women to sexually abuse.

According to residents in the camp, young women were selected to cook for them; afterwards, the operatives insisted that they bathe themselves in the officers' quarters while they watched with leering eyes and sordid intentions.
18-year-old Hadiza was raped as many as 20 times by security operatives in an IDP camp

18-year-old Hadiza revealed that she'd been raped by a soldier after she was instructed to serve water to four security officers in their room. Three of the officers had left the room just in time for the last one to drag her into a separate room and rape her.

Despite sweeping the episode under the rug and trying to keep a low profile, Hadiza claims that other soldiers marked her out and she was raped as many as 20 times in the camp.

"Once they identified you as a girl they wanted to have sex with, they would hardly leave you alone a single day," Hadiza said.

The widespread rape of young girls in Teachers Village was so well-known that people began showing up at the gates to look for missing relatives. Hadiza was found by her relatives and taken away from the camp.

Another unnamed 13-year-old girl claimed she had to flee from a camp in Maiduguri because security operatives, old enough to be her father, had raped her about 10 times.

Read More from source - Pulse NG

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