Reasons why Terrorists kidnap children

Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday June 5, 2014 at 16:9:39:

One of the ways terrorists carry out their hideous crime is through kidnap, and most times these terrorists focus on kidnapping children or women who are more vulnerable members of the society, as can be seen in the recent case of Chibok girls were over 200 young students where kidnapped from their school. The question now is, why terrorist focus on more on kidnapping of children? This article will provide some possible reasons why this is so.

- Children offer less resistance: As we have mentioned above, children are part of the vulnerable members of the society who will give little or no resistance when kidnapped, so terrorist prefer kidnapping children because they know that they will be unable to defend themselves and will put up little resistance when being kidnapped. Putting it in a short form, terrorists are cowards who know that they can only succeed with kidnapping young, defenseless adults.

- To protect themselves: At times, when terrorists feel that the heat is on them and that their opponents are winning, they would go out of their usual way to kidnap children just to have some bargaining power and higher ground. They feel that with the children in their kitty, the opposition forces would not be so forward with them.

- To bargain: Terrorists know that if they kidnap children and hold them as ransom in exchange for anything they demand, it will force concerned members of the society to comply to their request. So they use children as a leverage to get what they want. This can be seen in the case of the recently kidnapped Chibok girls where the Boko Haram leader is demanding for the release of their members held in custody in exchange for the girls.