Letter From the Archive: The Trauma of Abducted Children

After spending the past few weeks reading Alexis Okeowo’s excellent coverage of the kidnapping of more than three hundred girls in Nigeria, I found myself returning to an article that I’d read years ago: Elizabeth Rubin’s “Our Children Are Killing Us,” about the Lord’s Resistance Army and its practice of abducting children in Uganda. It’s the kind of piece that stays with you for a long time after the first read. Joseph Kony’s L.R.A. had kidnapped tens of thousands of Ugandan children, girls and boys, by 1998, when the piece was published. Many of them became child soldiers or soldiers’ wives; if they resisted, they were beaten or killed. I was struck, at the time, by Rubin’s haunting descriptions of the kidnappings, and of the unimaginable difficulties endured even by those who had escaped. The piece is an indelible examination of loss, and of the high price paid by families and communities when a child’s life is interrupted.

Rubin’s article opens with a description of a 1996 raid by the L.R.A. on St. Mary’s, a girls’ boarding school run by Italian Catholic missionaries near Aboke, in northern Uganda:

At 2:15 A.M., Sister Rachele Fassera, an Italian who is the deputy headmistress, was awakened by the knocking of the night watchman. “Sister,” he said. “They are here.” Most of the Ugandan Army’s soldiers guarding the school had been removed for rotation ten days earlier, and Sister Rachele had been promised that new soldiers were on the way. But, as she told me when I visited the school recently, “the way he said it, I understood.” And she said, “We reasoned that for sure they were not going to break the steel doors, so the girls would be safe.” Fearing that the rebels would force her to unlock the doors, she crept outside into the elephant grass with the other sisters and prayed.

But the rebels banged and chiseled away at the window frames for hours. They shouted to the girls to unlock the doors or they’d blow up the dorm. Grace, a fourteen-year-old, was hiding under her bed, in her nightdress, when a frightened girl opened the door and the rebels burst in. They pulled the girls from under the bed, tied them up in groups of five, and beat any who cried with rifle butts, flashlights, sticks, fists. The L.R.A. commander ordered silence as the rebels—most of whom were abducted children themselves—marched the girls out of the school and into the bush. It had rained earlier that night. Girls were slipping and falling, and were beaten for their feebleness.

Rubin follows the path of the abductees, detailing the extraordinary lengths to which Sister Rachele and a fellow teacher went in order to rescue them. After chasing down the rebels, they were greeted by dozens of children armed with AK-47s. Taken to the L.R.A. commander who coordinated the raid, the nun and the teacher ended up negotiating the return of a hundred and nine of the frightened girls; the L.R.A. kept thirty.

Rubin estimates that nearly eighty per cent of Kony’s troops at the time were abducted children between the ages of seven and seventeen. Perhaps three to five thousand had managed to escape. She spoke to several escapees at a trauma center run by a Danish charity near the town of Gulu. Some seemed numb to the acts of mutilation and killing in which they’d been forced to participate, while others were haunted by their victims. One escapee, Susan, spoke of seeing the ghost of her victim, a woman, following her in her dreams, saying to her, “I am dying, I am dying, I am being killed for nothing.” The trauma center that Rubin visited provided group therapy and other rehabilitating activities for the escapees, but the long-term goal seems like it would prove tricky for any child to achieve: “remembering to forget.”

The full article is available in our online archive. If you’d like to read more about the recent kidnappings in Nigeria, take a look at Alexis Okeowo’s posts, “Nigeria’s Stolen Girls” and “The Troubled Search for Nigeria’s Stolen Girls.”

A child&#8217s drawing depicts some of the atrocities witnessed in Uganda. Image via Alvaro Ybarra Zavala/Getty.