Alexis Okeowo in The New Yorker: Nigeria’s stolen girls.
If this were happening anywhere else in the world, there would have been non-stop international mass media coverage of the burnt school and the grieving families and relentless questioning of the relevant officials as to the inadequacy of the search and rescue operations.
For a while after the abduction, girls trickled back into town—some rolled off trucks, some snuck away while fetching water. That trickle has stopped. “Nobody rescued them,” a government official in Chibok said of the girls who made it back. “I want you to stress this point. Nobody rescued them. They escaped on their accord. This is painful.”
This atrocity has media hot-buttons all over it (schoolgirls, abduction from school, religious fanatics, a history of serial massacres, anti-Western extremism, sexual slavery, ineffective government response) and yet in the two weeks since it happened it’s hardly made a media ripple outside Nigeria itself. Instead I read about this for the first time yesterday on a few feminist blogs, and then saw the link to Okeowo’s longform piece.
These girls deserve better: from their government, from the global mass media, and from typical media consumers too, since it’s our general complacency which allows governments and mass media to sideline stories about abuses against girls and women of colour over and over again.
n.b. this post has been updated to make it clearer that it is the international lack of media interest that is being criticised. Journalists and activists within Nigeria have been working hard to make the story more widely heard in the face of government, military and global media inertia.