10 SPECIALREPORT
Boko Haram has maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of children across the Northeast. They live in turmoil, haunted by night, desperate by day. A bleak future ahead, they are stressed, and the country could pay the price.
It’s 11pm, the attack began, it was sudden. Armed men took the villagers unawares. Gunshots came from everywhere. A mother strapped her baby to her back, she wanted nothing else, except to flee, to save her baby. Other villagers went fleeing too.
The bullet struck her, she didn’t hear the thump of metal striking her flesh, didn’t notice when she fell dead.
Her baby was still strapped to her back, wailing in pain, unaware what happened. Her baby was Khadijah Yusuf (Not real name) . She was seven days old.
Another woman who was also fleeing saw Khadijah wailing, still strapped to her dead mother’s back. She picked the child and began a long, arduous race out of the village.
Khadijahs baby and her new foster mother wound up in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
Counselors providing child protection services for thousands of people displaced and currently in Maiduguri came across her, said Kingdom Alexander, a child protection expert with Plan International Nigeria in the city.
Khadijah was formally listed in a fostering programme as the daughter of the woman who found her.
“Now, the child is close to one year and surviving,” says Alexander.
From 2009 till date, the uprising in Nigeria’s Northeast has escalated from insurgency to outright terrorism. The brunt of suffering has been on children. The dead are counted, the living are shells of themselves.
“This is a crisis of child protection,” said Geoffrey Ijumba, head of the United Nations Children’s Fund field office in Borno, which also oversees neighbouring Adamawa and Yobe states.
“The insurgency has disrupted the protective environment of children. The protection and safety children feel at home, in school, living in normal community-the insurgency has flipped that over,” he said.
In May this year, the United Nations Secretary-General on children and armed conflicts reported to the Security Council six “grave violations” against children in conflicts from Yemen and Syria to Chad and Nigeria.
In 2017, Boko Haram recruited over 1,051 children, the civilian Joint Task Force helping to fight Boko Haram recruited 41.
Some 2,000 children were “deprived of liberty” because they or their parents were alleged to have been associated with Boko Haram. Last year, the military released 1,190. In July, it released another 183.
The United Nations verified a total 881 children killed or maimed-620 by Boko Haram and 261 by security forces.
Some 441 of the children were killed in suicide attacks by Boko Haram using children to carry improvised explosive devices.
Military aerial bombardments killed 235, another 26 were specifically targeted on suspicion of carrying improvised explosive devices on them.
For every child killed, hundreds more are thrust into mental anguish. With more than 1,400 schools destroyed, the playgrounds that children once knew and frolicked in are gone, so, too, their homes and parents.
Mental health experts have raised concerns about what instability and disrupted childhoods could mean for children’s future, and the country itself.
Leave home in the morning. Deal with traffic. Jostle your way through to work. Labour all day. Suffer incompetent subordinates. Deal with overbearing bosses. Go through the entire gamut on your way out of work. When you get home, you have loved ones to welcome you, help you take a load off, relieve the day’s pressure. Then get ready for another day.
For the children caught up in the violence of Boko Haram, their families are taken away from them, loved ones driven in disarray, they are unaccompanied, alone, not sure where they are sleeping, in new environments where nothing is familiar, no sense of where they will sleep, what they will, what the night holds, what the next day holds.
But live and cope, they must. How they do that is crucial. And it all comes down to the science behind stress management.
Researchers at Harvard University’s Centre on the Developing Child have offered explanations on how stress can become toxic.
When threatened, your body prepares you to respond: your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure spikes in that flee-or-flight response moment. So do levels of stress hormones like cortisol.
The stress response system is vital to dealing with adversity. When a child’s stress response system is activated within an environment of supportive relationships with adults, the psychological effects-the heart rate surge, blood pressure spike are buffered and brought back down to baseline. It could be anything from the presence of a supportive adult saying it is going to be okay, I got you, to just being there.
The result: Stress response system is healthy. It could go another way though. When that stress response is extreme and longlasting and buffering relationships are unavailable, the result can be damaged, weakened systems and brain architecture, with lifelong repercussions. Development and welfare workers have a nice label for them: “orphans