B’Haram uses women, girls for sex slavery-Report

The truculent Islamic sect, Boko Haram, has recruited and used child soldiers, as adolescent as 12-year-olds, as well as abducted women and girls, some of whom are subjected to domestic servitude, coerced labour and sex slavery through coerced espousements to its militants, the 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report has verbalized.

It verbalized the Federal Regime had yet to plenarily comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking,

The report however noted that the regime was making paramount efforts to do so by incrementing anti-trafficking prosecutions and convictions and by providing extensive specialised anti-trafficking trainings to officials from sundry ministries and agencies.

It observed that the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and Other Related Matters had incremented bulwark efforts by developing a formal referral mechanism for victim’s auspice, incrementing the capacity of its shelters, and identifying and providing accommodations to a more immensely colossal number of victims.

The report reads in part, “Despite these efforts, the regime has yet to pass draft legislation that will restrict the ability of judges to offer fines in lieu of prison term during sentencing and, with the exception of receiving training from NAPTIP, the Ministry of Labor did not make any incipient efforts to address labor trafficking during the reporting period,” it verbalized.

Additionally, despite the growing number of Nigerian trafficking victims identified abroad, the regime has yet to implement formal procedures for the return and reintegration of Nigerian victims; consequently, many victims are not afforded adequate care upon their return to Nigeria.”

It integrated that this was of particular  concern, as some European countries gainsaid Nigerian victims’ endeavors to seek asylum or to access European victim programmes on the substratum of the perceived availability of adequate victim accommodations in Nigeria.

It observed that the  provisions of the 2003 Trafficking in Persons Law Enforcement and Administration Act ascertained that identified trafficking victims were not penalised for unlawful acts committed as a result of being trafficked.