Joy Bishara was 15 years old when her friend frantically woke her in the middle of the night: “Joy, can’t you hear what’s going on? Get up, something’s wrong.” Bishara listened closely. She heard gunshots, followed by sounds of people screaming in her hometown, Chibok.  

On April 14, 2014, members of Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group based in Nigeria invaded a small Nigerian town, Chibok. Literally translating to “Western education is forbidden,” Boko Haram’s armed militants set Chibok schools on fire and kidnapped 276 schoolgirls to eradicate girls’ education.

That night, Bishara and her classmates were ushered outside their dorms and into large trucks at gunpoint. 

“[When] the truck started moving … I was like ‘is this the end of … dreaming of becoming a doctor?’” Bishara said in a 2019 United Nations assembly.

Scared, Bishara and her friend decided to jump out of the moving truck, eventually finding their way home. But unlike Bishara, then 24-year-old Naomi Adamu — the oldest of the girls — spent three years in Boko Haram’s captivity before her release where maintained a secret record of their experiences in a diary originally given to the captors to write down Islamic lessons.

“We were scared, but we knew we had to document our lives,” Adamu said in a 2021 interview with Channel 4 News. “If someone escaped, they could tell the story of what’s happening to us.”

After weeks of little to no government intervention, a small group of Nigerian activists protested the Nigerian government’s inaction by marching across a highway in the country’s capital, Abuja, tagging their tweets on what was formally Twitter with ‘#BringBackOurGirls.’  

Throughout the world, the hashtag garnered the attention of some of the world’s most notable individuals, including Pope Francis and the United States’ former First Lady Michelle Obama, who publicly advocated for the abducted schoolgirls’ safe return. 

Slowly, a hashtag and 276 girls became the world’s priority. 

#BringBackOurGirls started as a way to draw attention to the 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria, but turned into a social media movement fighting for women’s rights. 

“These Nigerian girls … were taken from their beds in the middle of the night by cowards who tell them that girls do not deserve an education,” said American actress Anne Hathaway in a protest. 

Repost after repost ultimately garnered the support of other nations. The U.S. dispatched a multidisciplinary team including military personnel, law enforcement advisers and humanitarian experts to Abuja to help the Nigerian military rescue the abductees. While these efforts allowed some girls to escape captivity on their own, others were released eventually due to the ongoing campaigning efforts through social media platforms and eventual governmental negotiations. 

10 years later, 98 Chibok girls still remain captive. But the campaign persists. #BringBackOurGirls resurfaces on social media, most notably Facebook, resulting in continued action from the Nigerian government to arrange for the girls’ rescue and finding a solution to ridding Nigeria of Boko Haram.  

Today, Bishara holds a degree in social work from Southeastern University, and Adamu resides in northern Nigeria as an aspiring businesswoman. With #BringBackOurGirls, the survivors continue to share their stories, and speak out against Boko Haram, hoping to free those who were forced to stay behind.