THE stench in the ward at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital that afternoon in 2005 was carefully contained, but nothing could mask the quiet despair in the eyes of the young girls lying there. They were vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) patients, children really, married too early, broken too soon, and abandoned too quickly. No one came to visit them.
I had accompanied a team from a German development agency on that trip as a journalist, and I remember standing there confronted not just by a medical condition but by something far deeper, neglect, silence, and a system that had already failed these girls long before their bodies did.
Years later, their faces remain with me, and today I see them again in different places, under different names, but trapped in the same cycle.
In parts of northern Nigeria, early marriage has long been linked to cases of VVF, yet far away in southern Nigeria where education is more widely embraced and child marriage is publicly condemned, another form of quiet violence persists.
In a community in Cross River State, a practice known as money marriage continues despite laws, outrage, and awareness. Here, girls are not just daughters, they are collateral.
Unborn children are promised, infants pledged, and toddlers, adolescents, and teenagers exchanged for money, livestock, or food, their futures negotiated before they even understand what life means.
An eight-year-old can be handed over to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and in some circles, this is still seen as a mark of status.
We often like to believe that injustice is distant and belongs somewhere else, something that does not concern us, but silence has a way of feeding what we refuse to confront, and what we ignore rarely disappears. It grows, it spreads, it deepens until one day it is too close and too overwhelming to ignore.
For many of these girls, childhood ends before it begins and education is the first casualty. A girl who should be learning to write her name is instead learning submission, her dreams quietly erased, school uniforms replaced with marital expectations, curiosity replaced with fear. With that loss comes something even more dangerous, the loss of choice.
Then comes the toll on the body. Medical experts have long warned of the consequences of early childbirth, and these are not abstract risks but lived realities. Young bodies not yet fully developed are forced into labour, some survive with lifelong complications like VVF while others do not survive at all. Pain becomes normalised, suffering becomes routine, and survival itself becomes uncertain.
But perhaps the most enduring damage is not physical, it is psychological. Trauma settles quietly into the mind, fear lingers, shame silences, and a sense of worth is slowly eroded.
Many of these girls grow into women carrying wounds no one sees and rarely acknowledges, and when trauma is left untreated, it does not end with the victim but spills into families, communities, and society.
Why does it persist. Poverty plays its part as families burdened and desperate make choices they believe are necessary for survival. Culture reinforces it as longstanding beliefs cloak injustice in tradition, and systems meant to protect fail to intervene.
Nigeria has laws, the Child Rights Act is clear, and so are state laws prohibiting child marriage and exploitation, yet enforcement remains inconsistent and sometimes absent.
In communities where money marriage has been officially banned, it continues quietly, hidden from outsiders but deeply embedded within, and this gap between what is written in law and what is lived in reality is where the girl child continues to suffer.
There have been efforts as community leaders speak out, governments make pronouncements, and organisations step in offering rehabilitation, education, and hope. Some girls have been rescued and given a second chance, but many remain unseen, unheard, and still waiting.
Breaking this cycle requires more than condemnation, it demands presence, consistent enforcement of the law in practice, economic support for families so daughters are not seen as solutions to poverty, and access to education not as a privilege but as a right.
It also demands recognition of trauma as central to healing, because what is broken is not only the system but the human spirit within it.
There is a dangerous assumption that if something does not touch us directly, it does not affect us, but a society that allows its children to be traded, its girls to be silenced, and its laws to be ignored is building a crisis that will not remain contained. One day it will demand attention, and by then it may be harder to breathe.
The girls in that hospital ward years ago were not just patients, they were warnings of what happens when we look away for too long and of what silence can do.
Until we learn to hear the pain we silence, the echoes will never fade.
Okenwa, a journalist, lawyer and Publisher of Law and Society Magazine, could be reached on lillianokenwa@gmail.com
