Bring back our girls

Tomorrow it ill be two months to the day nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted from the remote village of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria by the renegade group Boko Haram—and still no word of them.

Despite the bumbling indifference and much-delayed military response of Nigerian officials, global pressure has produced some results in the largely fruitless search for the girls (now of a lesser number, some having managed to escape). Because of the expressed outrage and protest actions of the girls’ family members that exposed the crisis to the world, international celebrities, leaders and social media—through the hashtag #bringbackourgirls—shamed the Nigerian government enough for it to accept offers of advice, expertise and surveillance technology from the United States, Britain, Israel and China.

The global pressure has led the Boko Haram to backtrack from its original threat of selling the girls as wives to Islamist militants, to demanding instead a prisoner swap for the captives.

But what is behind this barbaric act? Why target hapless young girls in a boarding school? Previous to the incident, the Boko Haram also burned down a number of schools in Nigeria and shot, stabbed dead and torched scores of boys and their teachers. What did the terrorist group hope to achieve with its brazen and bloody siege?

Boko Haram, according to news reports, translates to “Western education is sin.” Offering the girls as wives and, later, showing pictures of them in Muslim garb and praying, showed up the kidnappers’ mindset: that women are meant mainly as domestic chattel and docile homemakers for whom education is superfluous.

While there is little we can do except to add our voice to the global outrage and to continue to express our support for efforts to rescue the girls, we have more leeway to prevent the spread of the Boko Haram mindset about girls and women.

In our backyard, we see the same mentality in mercantile form: The cybersex trade that flourishes in areas such as the town of Cordova in Cebu shows that some parents see their young daughters mainly as profitable assets to hawk online instead of human beings who deserve privacy and dignity, and their personal responsibility to feed, clothe and send to school.

The Cebu cybersex industry in fact reminds us strongly of how old folks used to describe girls: “pambayad-utang,”  or debt payment, perhaps in reference to the tenancy arrangement that had impoverished peasants trading off their daughters’ virtue and labor so that landowners would allow them to continue tilling the land for next to nothing.

For the longest time, girls were also expected to stop schooling after learning to read and count in grade school—the perverse logic being that they’d only get married and breed, and they hardly need a college degree for that.

In China as well, girls are considered dispensable: aborted as fetuses, smothered at birth, or given up for international adoption. And all because the coveted child in that patriarchal country’s “one-child policy” is male. The skewed male-female ratio has resulted in a thriving sex trade and the widespread abduction of young women to serve as brides, especially in remote villages where the traditional bias for male heirs is strongest.

So, yes, we need not look far to find that girls in this part of the world are also missing—rendered invisible by a mindset similar to that of the Boko Haram.

But surely, the best way to defeat that terrorist group and its way of thinking is to make sure that its tenets wither on the vine. Every one of us should learn to value our girls and make sure that they get the same opportunities as their brothers, that they stay in school where they can learn, beyond the 3Rs, what life holds out for them.

The Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who as a schoolgirl survived being shot in the head in 2012 by a gunman of the Taliban in its attempt to end her campaign for the right of girls to an education, has set up “The Malala Fund.” Malala, now 17, is seeking donations “to support Nigerian organizations educating and standing up for girls.”

Tony Blair, former prime minister of Britain, describes the missing girls as Nigeria’s future. So too are our own girls our personal stake in a better future.