Girl from Niger takes a stand against forced marriage

Balkissa Chaibou dreamed of becoming a doctor, but when she was 12 she was shocked to learn she had been promised as a bride to her cousin. She decided to fight for her rights – even if that meant taking her own family to court. “I came from school at around 18:00, and Mum called me,” Balkissa Chaibou recalls. “She pointed to a group of visitors and said of one of them, ‘He is the one who will marry you.’ “I thought she was joking. And she told me, ‘Go unbraid, and wash your hair.’ That is when I realised she was serious.”



The young girl from Niger had always been ambitious. “When I was little, I was dreaming of becoming a doctor. Take care of people, wear the white coat. Help people,” she says. Marriage to her cousin, who had arrived with his father from neighbouring Nigeria, would make this impossible. 

“They said if you marry him you won’t be able to study any more. For me my passion is studying. I really like to study. That’s when I realised that my relationship with him wouldn’t work well.” Niger’s tradition of marrying its girls young – it has the highest rate of child marriage in the world – is partly rooted in its grinding poverty. A life of shame if you don’t find marriage “The dynamic works in this way: I have lots of children, and if I can marry off one child that is one child less that I have to feed,” explains Monique Clesca, the United Nations Population Fund’s representative in Niger. 

Balkissa Chaibou’s parents had five daughters, so from their perspective marrying her to her cousin may have made economic sense. But another reason for the tradition of early marriage in Niger is the belief that it reduces the risk of pregnancy outside wedlock. “Nowadays some children are not well brought up,” says Hadiza Almahamoud, Chaibou’s mother. “If they are not married off at an early age, they can bring shame to the family.”



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Nurse lures woman to UK as sex slave, makes her swear a juju oath

                                         
Florence Obadiaru, 50, and her two fellow gang members, Olusoji Oluwafemi and Johnson Olayinka, have lured an unnamed Nigerian woman to the Great Britain promising her job to repay the debt but when she arrived forced her into prostitution instead.

The 23-year-old entered the country using a bogus passport in September 2011, whereupon she was kept at Obadiaru’s house pending her transfer to Italy to work as a sex slave. Luckily, Italian officials noted the woman’s false ID and sent her back to the UK. Shortly afterwards Obadiaru, who had worked as a carer for ten year, and her accomplices were arrested and brought to justice. Jailing the trio, Judge Rebecca Poulet QC had said: “This was a sophisticated and carefully planned operation in Nigeria which must have cost a considerable amount of money to the traffickers. The expected returns were also considerable. She was subjected to a juju ritual with the threat of death.

She would have been forced into controlled prostitution as she had no possible way in which she could conceivably support herself in Italy. While I doubt this was the first trafficking you were involved in I do sentence you on the basis that this involved just the one victim.” Obadiaru, from Brockley, south-east London, was jailed for two years, while Olusoji Oluwafemi and Johnson Olayinka were jailed for six-and-a-half years and four-and-a-half years respectively. The woman is just one of many victims of an organised crime group based in Africa which traffics young women through England to work as prostitutes in mainland Europe.


Source: Naij.com