WUNRN
Nigeria - Are Chibok Abducted Schoolgirls Carrying Out Atrocities for Boko Aram? Complex Overview
Children
rescued from Boko Haram in Sambisa forest react at a clinic at the internally
displaced people's camp in Yola, Nigeria,
May
2015 (Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters).
By Catherine Powell - July 16, 2015
It has been nearly
fifteen months since Boko Haram abducted nearly three
hundred girls from a secondary school in Chibok, Nigeria, sparking
the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on Twitter. Since then, reports have surfaced that
the girls have been sold, forcibly converted to Islam, and married to terrorist
group members. Dozens of the girls managed to escape, but despite efforts to secure the release
of the remaining 219 captives, no agreement has come through.
Recent reports from other former captives of Boko Haram
indicate that the fate of the Chibok girls has taken an even darker turn. Many
are allegedly carrying out atrocities on behalf of Boko Haram, including
flogging prisoners who are unable to recite the Quran or killing Christian
captives.
This is not the
first instance of Boko Haram employing women in their attacks. According to the
Aljazeera Center for Studies,
women were responsible for fifteen of Boko Haram’s successful suicide bombings
as of January. An April Amnesty International report includes the story
of a girl forced to learn how to shoot, use bombs, and attack villages on pain
of death: “Some refused to learn how to kill others. They were buried in a mass
grave in the bush. They’ll just pack the dead bodies and dump them in a big
hole, but not deep enough.”
This is the first
report of the Chibok girls participating in atrocities outside of the context
of suicide attacks. The 219 girls were last seen in video in May 2014, reciting the Quran and looking
terrified.
This horrifying
revelation raises the question of the girls’ culpability or complicity in Boko
Haram’s attacks. It is clear from testimony of eyewitnesses that they have
undergone trauma. As one former captive said, “Anyone who sees the Chibok girls
has to feel sorry for them,” and experts who have examined other freed captives
of Boko Haram called for “intensive psychological treatment.”
Given their presumed state of duress, can these girls be held responsible for
their actions?
One useful
framework to answer this question is that of child soldiers under the law. According
to the 2007 Paris Principles and Guidelines
on Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups, “children
who are accused of crimes under international law allegedly committed while
they were associated with armed forced or armed groups should be considered
primarily as victims and not as perpetrators.” While this is not an exact legal
proscription in the case of the Chibok girls—who were between the ages of
sixteen and eighteen, and therefore not considered child soldiers under either
the International Criminal Court Statute
(ICC) nor the Additional Protocol II of the Geneva
Conventions—the fact that the girls likely acted under severe duress
should be considered as a mitigating circumstance.
Thus, the law of
duress is another possible framework for analyzing the legal responsibility of
the schoolgirls. The usage of the duress defense varies across international
and national legal systems. For example, in most common law countries—including
the United States and United Kingdom—duress is only a mitigating circumstance
in sentencing, not a complete defense against criminal liability. In
international law, under Article 31 of the ICC statute, a defendant can be
freed from criminal responsibility for “conduct which is alleged to constitute
a crime [that] has been caused by duress resulting from a threat of imminent
death or of continuing or imminent serious bodily harm against that person or
another person,” as long as he or she “acts necessarily and reasonably to avoid
this threat” and “does not intend to cause a greater harm than the one sought
to be avoided.” Since we have little information on the circumstances facing
the schoolgirls—other than the few skeletal accounts offered from those who
have escaped—it is not clear that the Chibok girls’ situation fits this duress
defense scenario, particularly regarding the immediacy of the threat of force.
A final potential
framework is that of Stockholm Syndrome, when a captive becomes bonded to his
or her captor or “brainwashed.” Reportedly, the Chibok girls are now acting as
Quranic teachers for Boko Haram, making statements like “You women should learn
from your husbands because they are giving their blood for the cause. We must
also go to war for Allah”—arguably an indication that they may be suffering
from one of these types of conditions. In one of the most famous cases
characterized as turning on Stockholm Syndrome—that of Patty Hearst, who carried
out an armed robbery on behalf of her kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation
Army—the duress defense was not successful, since she committed the crime
after the initial state of duress. In fact, though Hearst was characterized as
“brainwashed” in the media, a court-appointed expert in the Hearst
case noted that “brainwashing” was actually a misnomer for the coercion
alleged in the case.
Given the limited information available about the current state of the Chibok girls, it is difficult to know whether they could be held culpable for their actions under international or Nigerian law. But rehabilitation should be considered as a primary response, in contrast to punishment, for the ordeal they have suffered for too long.