Report: How Sex is Traded for Safety, Survival in IDP Camps in Nigeria 

Linus Aleke in Abuja 

A civil society organisation, Global Rights Nigeria, has exposed sexual abuse behind the walls and tents of Internally Displaced Persons Camps (IDPs) in Nigeria, lamenting that the crisis is quiet but devastating. 

The CSO, in its latest report on sexual abuse in IDP camps in Nigeria, stated that women and girls, already stripped of their homes and livelihoods, now find themselves vulnerable to daily sexual exploitation.

According to the report, “Access to food, clean water, medicine, or a place to sleep is often conditioned on sex. The perpetrators are rarely strangers. Usually, they are those entrusted with the survivors’ care. These include camp officials, security agents, aid workers, or even fellow displaced persons. Here, power is traded for safety, and silence is traded for survival.

“This is not just about isolated instances of abuse. What is unfolding in Nigeria’s IDP camps is a widespread, systemic failure, one that has normalised coercion and buried the cries of survivors beneath layers of fear, shame, and neglect. Girls are being raped while fetching water. Pregnant women are assaulted by partners and left to manage the trauma alone. Many never speak out, afraid of stigma, cut off from justice, and dependent on their abusers for basic needs.”

Sexual violence in the camps, the report said, is pervasive, underreported, and often met with impunity. 

“In April 2025, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Global Rights conducted fieldwork in 10 IDP camps across Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, and the FCT, engaging with survivors, community members, and frontline workers. The findings reveal a disturbing truth: where displacement meets abandonment, sexual violence thrives.

“This report is a call to attention, a call to accountability, and most of all, a call to care, because what is happening in these camps is not just a humanitarian crisis; it is a human rights failure.”

Displacement, the CSO said, should never mean danger and every woman and girl deserves a better and safer environment.

The report, which is titled ‘Sexual Violence and the Hidden Agony of Nigeria’s Displaced Women and Girls’, revealed that Nigeria is currently home to over three million internally displaced persons – families and individuals forced to flee their homes by insurgency, armed conflict, banditry, and climate-induced devastation.

“From Adamawa to Zamfara to the outskirts of Abuja, makeshift camps have emerged as temporary shelters for the displaced. These spaces were meant to offer protection, but for thousands of women and girls, they have become places of deep and lasting harm, not sites of safety, but of sustained sexual violence,” the report further lamented.