UNFPA Promises Support for Rescued Girls, Women
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has stated that it will be offering psychosocial support to the 687 women recently rescued from the Sambisa forest by the Nigerian Army.
The UNFPA Executive Director, Professor Babatunde Osotimehin, who disclosed this during a media chat with journalists in Lagos recently, stated that, closer observation of the rescued girls and women showed that most of them have been disconnected from reality based on their experience in the hands of their captors.
He said: “Since we have discovered that the magnitude of the challenge on ground is huge and there are no sufficient human resources to cope with this, we have sought for foreign assistance in human resources to help in the recovery process for these women and young girls.
He said the assistance of providing psychosocial and trauma management support would require collective assistance, as the harm done to the girls during their abduction period was immeasurable.
Osotimehin, a former minister of health in Nigeria, said he was in the country to assess the level of assistance being rendered by UNFPA to the freed girls.
He also spoke of his encounter with the rescued women. “I saw so many women and children who have so much stress written all over them, some were lost in their lonely world oblivious of where they are and many showed signs that they obviously had been traumatised by their various experiences.
“There is no doubt that these women and their children had gone through so much since they were abducted and it would definitely take a lot of effort to give them the needed psycho- social support in order to reintegrate them into the real lives they had been used to prior tothe abduction,” Osotimehin said.
The UNFPA boss also explained that the young girls and women were already undergoing screening for various diseases, as well as to check their mental state. “214 of those already screened were discovered to be at various stages of pregnancies, some visibly pregnant and some just tested pregnant; but we are supporting all of them with various levels of care,” he added.
Osotimehin explained that UNFPA has been at the forefront of providing necessary human and material resources, especially family planning commodities for the country and has been training support staff for over a year in preparation for the return of the abducted women and girls in the Northeast.
He said in 2014, the UN body gave assistance to the federal government by providing commodities which aided the delivery of 16, 000 pregnant women in various camps for the internally displaced.
He also revealed that some of the children freed by the Nigerian Army were born in Sambisa forest and that they had never been out in the open until their release by the military.
“From this week, medical commodities that had been stored in preparation for the return of the women would be deployed from the various stores in the north to Borno State to help put smiles on the faces of the women and girls.”
He said considering the fact that the dignity of the women had been abused during their stay in the forest, the UN body is putting together kits tagged ‘human dignity kits’ containing personal effects like clothes, sanitary wares, soaps, among others.
“We are also putting together counsellors who will use use these kits to also help stabilise these women,” he said.
It would be recalled that the Nigerian Army last week Tuesday announced the rescue of 293 girls and women from the Boko Haram enclave while another set of 160 and 234 were also rescued within the same week.