Nigerian girls as young as ten years old are being sold through Facebook to pay off their parents’ debts – it has been revealed.
According to the Daily Beast young girls in the Becheve community, a group of 17 villages in Obanliku, Nigeria, are regularly exchanged for food, livestock or cash.
The girls, who are referred to as ‘money women’ or ‘money wives’ are often advertised on Facebook and sometimes sold to men ‘old enough to be their grandfathers’.
One girl, Monica, told the Daily Beast how she and her sister were sold without their consent to clear a debt their father owed to a distant relative.
Monica said she and her sister got married a month apart to men they had never met and who were far older than them.
“My father knew nothing about Facebook until my elder brother bought him a smartphone and convinced him to join Facebook and post our photographs whenever he likes,” Monica said.
“He’ll buy new clothes and force me and my sisters to put them on before taking photographs of us.’
“It is young people who convince old men to look for wives on Facebook,’ said Monica, who ran away from her husband to live with a friend less than a year after she got married.
“The man I married said his oldest son showed him my photo on Facebook and directed him to my father.”
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Usually in the Becheve community, parents of the money brides take the girls to men who can afford to pay for their daughters.
But in recent months, families who are so desperate to give their children away for money turn to Facebook so their kinsmen can check them out.
‘The practice is meant to boost the status of the men in Becheve community,’ Magnus Ejikang, a local chief in Ogbakoko, told The Daily Beast. ‘The more brides you have, the more respect you gain in the community.’
Spokespeople for Facebook, when contacted by The Daily Beast, were not familiar with the phenomenon as practiced in the Becheve community.
