- About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from the captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.
More than two hundred schoolgirls were abducted two weeks ago. Fifty escaped. This has not been getting front page news. It should. The linked article has the latest news.
Sold into marriage probably because there's no such thing as dating in large parts of Third World Muslim Land, since women and men are ridiculously segregated and have pretty much no sexual outlets or the ability to 'shop around' before getting hitched to someone of their choosing, in a relationship where nobody has an advantage over the other. I wonder if any of these extremists ever find themselves reflecting on the fact that they are so unattractive that they had to ABDUCT and BUY a "wife". Anyway, I'm not going to get too much more into depth on this subject because someone might confuse me for a racist when I'm criticizing something that just happens to be a thing that happens in several non-Western cultures (and happened in Western cultures until relatively recently in the history of our species, too).
I'm sorry, I know you preempted this with saying you're not racist at the end, but everything you said it so very wrong and is a gross example of Orientalism. What you describe is an extremely, extremely small part of Muslim culture, and you're either naive or racist if you think people aren't dating and fucking their hearts out in every country of the world with whoever they choose. It may not be as open as in the Western world, and it may not happen as often, but it happens non-stop. Extremists are called extremists for a reason: they're on the fringes of societies. We still have cults and religious nuts here that do very similar things, and Western, first-world countries are still the primary buyers of sex slaves. These things are just as condemned in Nigeria as they are in America; and furthermore, Nigeria isn't some backwards third-world country. There is little doubt that they are going to be one of the wealthiest nations in the world in the next fifteen to twenty years, and already an economic powerhouse.
I don't doubt this ends up happening in the de facto sense, but am I wrong in suggesting that it's much less accepted in Muslim Nigeria? (I am somewhat aware that it's bifurcated by religion) Which parts of North Africa and the Middle East are more likely to have this sort of social segregation? I'm pretty sure, for example, that this happens in Saudi Arabia, but probably less so in places like Lebanon or Iran... Regarding Nigeria being or not being a backwards third-world country, this provokes thoughts for me of what I've seen on my travels in the United States: there are parts of it that are not too far off from third-world; I know of at least one area in my own state that is like this. My point is that just because an area isn't part of the West doesn't mean objectionable shit isn't ingrained in an area, and that criticizing either Western or non-Western cultures seems to be limited to members of that culture (the locals see Boko Haram as extremists, as you said, but there are other cases where, for example, objectionable shit happens in other places, like forced marriage, FGM, killing albino children, and so on, and... frankly, that merits condemnation from everybody). And the West in many ways has much to clean in its own house. I know that. There's still hate crime against black people and gay people, there's still a lot of fallout from past periods of institutionalized discrimination, and there's a lot of other shit, but it would be folly to deny that there's a lot that's been resolved that in many ways places like the Middle East are dealing with now (I mean, for fuck's sake, Saudi Arabia is basically the biggest example here - they won't let women drive or go anywhere without a dude. Are you going to call me pointing that out Orientalism?) - and even within the West, Europe's got racism issues that looks an awful lot like ones the US has dealt with in the past and in turn Europe's dealt with things like gay marriage and universal healthcare that the US is still working out. Hell, it took Ireland and Malta a while to catch up with the rest of the world, both Western and non-Western, when they legalized divorce as recently as 1997 and sometime in the 2000s. And they still haven't gotten the news about reproductive rights, since women from those countries have to fly the coop to get an abortion. EDIT: As an aside, what the heck are we all supposed to do with this? If this isn't a concrete expose of something being severely rotten in that part of the world that is decidedly NOT really a thing in the West, I don't know what is...you're either naive or racist if you think people aren't dating and fucking their hearts out in every country of the world with whoever they choose.