Here's Boko Haram in February 2014:
Mass killing of school children at the Federal Government College in the Buni Yadi area of Yobe was shrouded in mystery after reports revealed that only male students were killed.
It has been learnt, however that the extremists intentionally spared the female students.
According to the officials, female students at the co-ed school were spared – and that the attackers instead told them to go home and get married and to abandon their Western education (Boko Haram – meaning “against Western education”).
Now here's one example of the much broader coverage of Boko Haram's actions the following month:
The high school girls, asleep in their dormitory, awoke to gunfire. The attackers stormed the school, set it on fire, and, residents said, then herded several hundred terrified girls into the vehicles — and drove off and vanished.
... The attack in Nigeria is part of a global backlash against girls’ education by extremists.
.... If the girls aren’t rescued, “no parent will allow their female child to go to school,” Hadiza Bala Usman, who has led protests in Nigeria on behalf of the missing girls, warned in a telephone interview.
I rejected those calling Boko Haram's attack in February as being those of an organization campaigning solely against men's education, and it seems to me that the opposite misrepresentation is now cropping up in the media based on the results of the latest attack by them. Just as February's attack didn't demonstrate a singular focus against the education of boys, April's attack showing them targetting girls also doesn't seem to reflect their overarching campaign. They're against Western education as a whole - both of girls and of boys - rather than just targeting girls. See only part of the problem and it seems to me that you're likely to develop less effective solutions.
Where I do agree with Kristof's comments from the New York Times is on the resources devoted to this search relative to that for a certain missing plane:
While there has been a major international search for the missing people on Malaysian flight MH370, and nonstop news coverage, there has been no meaningful search for the even greater number of missing schoolgirls.
Boko Haram's strategy of using kidnapping as a tactic when targetting girls (as opposed to various forms of slaughter when targetting boys) means that in the former case there's at least a hope of getting some of those kidnapped girls back. The same can't be said for those boys targetted in the previous attack.
