Due to the
insurgency by Boko Haram terrorists that have driven millions from their
communities, women in Lake Chad are forced into prostitution to survive, The
International Committee of the Red Coss (ICRC) said on Thursday.
The violence has
displaced more than 2.4 million people across the swamplands of Lake Chad,
where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria meet, and disrupted the
livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of others, ICRC says. Up to a million
people have been cut off from humanitarian aid by Boko Haram despite a regional
military offensive against the Islamist militants, according to the United
Nations.
It's (extraordinary)
... to see a woman and her family and they have nothing other than what they've
been given. The children are clearly malnourished and it's just hopeless,"
said Simon Brooks, head of ICRC's delegation in Cameroon.
As the head of their
households, some mothers have been forced to sell sex so they could feed their
family, since many no longer have husbands because of the conflict, Brooks
said.
"When you don't
have the means to survive, you'll go begging for it. It's a loss of dignity
when you're having to resort to something like that just to keep your children
alive - fraternising with people who have money."
The unfolding
catastrophe in the Lake Chad basin was named the most neglected crisis of 2016
in a poll of aid agencies by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Overshadowed by
the wars in Syria and Iraq and the global refugee and migrant crisis, Lake Chad
has barely made the headlines, Brooks said during an interview in London. More
than 7 million people lack food but insecurity makes it hard for aid agencies
to reach the most vulnerable.
Half a million
children are severely acutely malnourished and on the brink of death if they
are not treated, Brooks said. "This area has suffered from decades of
chronic neglect ... if it continues to be under-funded and under-reported, then
millions of people will continue to suffer," he said.
Source: Reuters
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