BBC Africa is reporting that Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a report, titled Hostages of the Gatekeepers, detailing information on the abuse of internally displaced people in Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia. Included among these abuses is sexual violence against women and girls who are held as captives in the camps by militias and armed groups, including Somalian government forces. While the new UN-backed Somalian government established last year was beginning to show promise, little has been done to combat serious issues such as the abuses in the Mogadishu camps.
According to BBC Africa:
The report contains harrowing quotes from women who say they have been raped, including 23-year-old Quman. She says she was nine months pregnant when she was gang raped by three men in government army uniform.
Another woman, Safiyo, had to have her leg amputated after she was raped and shot.
Sexual violence is under-reported, the report says, because women fear stigma and reprisal.
The recent brief imprisonment of a displaced Somali woman who told the authorities she had been raped will not help matters, reports the BBC’s Africa analyst Mary Harper.
This news brief was written by Kaitlin Higgins.
Read more at BBC Africa.
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