Grounded In Fact

Sources: 63 women, girls escape Boko Haram. Over 200 schoolgirls taken in April still believed to be with group. cnn.it/VRFjsH—
CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) July 07, 2014

Tim Allen, a professor at the London School of Economics, specializes in researching ethnic conflict, forced migration, and development aid. In an interview, he explains why in-person fieldwork is so crucial to understanding international development efforts. He takes Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army as an example:

The external perception is that this is a mad group abducting children, not unlike Boko Haram who may well have learnt some of their methodology from the LRA. Actually, the vast majority of those abducted are young adults who might be trained to fight. There was also an interest in taking prepubescent girls because they were thought not to be HIV positive. Those girls were married, using local idiom, to commanders and were not raped indiscriminately. The most disturbing thing is that most of them were reasonably positive about the experience.

Of course some were severely traumatised, but the idea of abducting women for marriage has deep roots in this society. Many women talk about having been captured by their husbands. I’m not excusing this in any way, but they take a local custom of abducting women into marriage and play upon it. Also, the effects of 19th-century slave-raiding, involving large-scale abductions, still resonate here. Working at the local level reveals all sorts of things.

Previous Dish on the LRA here, here, and here.