WEAPONIZED SEX: ABANDONING VICTIMS OF TRAFFICKING
Women in War Zones Face Routine Sex Trafficking and Forced Marriages
By Mary Kiara
BORNO, Nigeria – Fleeing years of insurgent enslavement, rescued Nigerian women seeking government sanctuary are instead being coerced back into forced marriages with their Boko Haram captors in Borno State, TruthNigeria has learned.
The institutional betrayal is documented in the U.S. State Department’s 2026 Trafficking In Persons (TIP) report published October 11 which explicitly notes: “The government coerces victims of forced marriage, including trafficking victims, to return to their Boko Haram husbands in Borno State demobilisation centres.”
The assessment underscored the severe dangers faced by those who resist Islamist indoctrination, pointing out that: “Boko Haram punishes girls, including for refusing to marry, by forcing them to be suicide bombers.”
The disclosure coincides with Washington’s decision to place Nigeria on the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) list over continued child recruitment by jihadist factions, a designation that threatens restrictions on military assistance and weapons sales unless a presidential waiver is granted.
Institutional Gaps and Victim Abandonment
Amnesty International’s report, “Help us build our lives,” documented how girls who escaped Boko Haram captivity were unlawfully held in military detention for periods ranging from several days to almost four years between 2015 and mid-2023.
“These girls, many of them now young women, had their childhood stolen from them and suffered a litany of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses,” Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said.
“An enormous number of girls suffered horrific abuse in Boko Haram captivity, with many survivors then detained or neglected by their government.”
Hauwa* was a teenager when Boko Haram militants abducted her. To save her father from being killed, she “agreed” to marry one of them. Her “husband” beat her when she refused him and raped her repeatedly.
After she escaped, the Nigerian government offered her no protection. Instead, authorities treated her as a suspect, one of dozens of girls documented who were unlawfully detained by the military after fleeing Boko Haram captivity.
The State Department’s report also points to gaps in Nigeria’s wider response to trafficking.
Nigerian authorities identified 2,004 trafficking victims during the reporting period, including 893 victims of sex trafficking and 1,111 victims of forced labour. Only 675 received government-supported assistance, compared with 2,058 in the preceding reporting period, the report said.
Human Rights Watch documented sexual abuse, including rape and exploitation, of 43 women and girls living in seven internally displaced persons camps in Maiduguri.
In some cases, victims were raped by security forces and vigilante groups responsible for their protection.
“It is bad enough that these women and girls are not getting much-needed support for the horrific trauma they suffered at the hands of Boko Haram,” Mausi Segun, senior Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.
“It is disgraceful and outrageous that people who should protect these women and girls are attacking and abusing them.”
Psychological Toll
“When you return a girl or woman to the custody of the man who held her in forced servitude, you are effectively signing a warrant for her continued sexual assault, rape, and severe physical battery,” Dianah Kamande, a board member at the UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking, said in an interview.
“The abuser interprets the return as state permission to escalate control, often resulting in total isolation, forced pregnancies, and heightened physical danger for the victim.”
“When these girls escape and are subsequently neglected by society or returned to their ‘militant husbands’ by camp gaps, they undergo massive psychological regression,” Hauwa Musa Magaji, a psychosocial counselor who has worked with UNICEF child-protection networks in Northeast Nigeria, told TruthNigeria.
“They absorb the community’s stigma and begin to believe the abuser’s narrative that the forest or the abuser is the only place they belong or will be fed. It destroys any sense of self-worth and traps them in a trauma bond out of pure survival.”
“Prolonged captivity fosters psychological dependencies like Stockholm syndrome, where victims empathize with or defend their abusers as a survival mechanism, there’s no reason to abandon them” Gloria Puldu, president of the LEAH Foundation, told TruthNigeria.
International Corroboration
On June 1, 2026, five UN special rapporteurs wrote to the Nigerian government expressing “grave concern” about the abduction and sexual assault of girls and the “inaction and complicity of government officials in the face of these abuses.”
Nigeria’s Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act, 2015, criminalizes actions that return a trafficking victim to an exploitative environment.
No official has been prosecuted under these provisions for returning a trafficking victim to a Boko Haram husband.
The Nigerian government has not denied the TIP Report’s allegation. Instead, NAPTIP has advertised Nigeria’s Tier 2 classification and increased anti-trafficking funding, drowning out the finding that the state returns victims to their captors.
As security forces and humanitarian agencies navigate the fallout from the latest U.S. assessment, civil society leaders emphasize that true rehabilitation requires genuine sanctuary rather than bureaucratic complicity.
Mary Kiara reports on Terrorism for TruthNigeria.
