Photos of kidnapped girls

Even though the plight of 219 kidnapped Nigerian girls has dropped out of the nation's headlines, the Acton Institute is reminding us that their parents are still stuck in a never-ending nightmare that is being lived by too many young women around the world. Let's not forget!

Writing for the Acton Institute Blog, Elise Hilton is reminding the public that the parents of the stolen girls have been living without their precious daughters for 60 days while the government is no closer to rescuing them.

" . . . (T)ry to imagine how it must feel to have a loved one, the most loved one, taken from you. It is heart-wrenching. Gut-churning. Evil," Hilton writes.

According to a recent report from Voice of America, a total of 57 girls have escaped from the hold of their kidnappers, the Boko Haram Islamic terrorist group, who kidnapped them from their school in the Nigerian town of Chibok in April. This leaves the whereabouts of 219 girls still unknown.

What is happening in Nigeria is a problem that young girls in many parts of the world are experiencing simply because they are such easy targets for extremists.

" . . . (T)hey are not physically strong, they are easy to control through fear and sexual abuse. We hear of incidents in India, Iraq, Afghanistan. Many times, the 'crime' the girls are committing is fighting to become educated," Hilton writes.

In this article, written by Gordon Brown, special envoy to the United Nations for Global Education, he explains just how the dismal is the situation of women in many parts of the world.

"The killings, the rapes, the mutilations, the trafficking and the abductions shock western eyes because the assaults seem so out of the ordinary. However, they are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern where the violation of girls is commonplace. A pattern where girls’ rights are still only what rulers decree and where girls’ opportunities are no more than what patriarchs decide."

For instance, during the course of this week, at least 200,000 school age girls in Africa and Asia, some as young as 10 years old, will be married against their will because they have no rights, no power, no way to stop this from happening.

"Thousands more will be subjected to genital mutilation because they have no power to stop a practice designed to make them acceptable as child-brides and for adolescent childbirth," Hilton says.

Girls as young as eight will be forced to work in mine shafts, in factories and fields, in domestic service, or trafficked into prostitution even though all of these girls have a right, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be at school.

" . . . (W)e are in the midst of a liberation struggle that has yet to establish every girl’s right to life, education and dignity," Hilton concludes. "219 missing girls. 219 girls who represent the wicked repression of the human spirit, human dignity and the right for all young people to be educated safely and in freedom. 219 stolen girls. Let’s not forget."

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