Nigeria, Dec. 7 -- Abubakar* remembers the night a lot changed. "I was sleeping under a corridor when somebody touched me," the teenager recalled. "They didn't tell me anything. They just said I should follow."

Before he could understand what was happening, he was in the back of a van with dozens of other underage boys like him-tired, confused, and half-awake.

At the temporary camp where they were taken after last year's raid by the religious police, Hisbah, he slept in a vast hall on thin mattresses lined from wall to wall. The mats stretched across the entire floor, giving little space between one child and the next.

"We prayed when they said we should pray, we ate when they said we should eat. Nobody asked where I came from. Nobody ...