SIERRA LEONE WOMENS ISSUES

Thousands of women and girls were systematically raped and sexually abused in Sierra Leone.

Civilians are gunned down within their houses, rounded up and massacred on the streets, thrown from the upper floors of buildings, used as human shields, and burned alive in cars and houses. They have their limbs hacked off with machetes, eyes gouged out with knives, hands smashed with hammers, and bodies burned with boiling water.

Thousands of women of all ages have been raped and abducted. Often they have been forced to become the sexual partner or wife of combatants.

Beyond the brutality and trauma of rape itself, sexual assault can result in serious physical injury, forced pregnancy, disease and even death. The terror wreaked by rebel forces on civilians has also included men being forced to rape members of their own family under threat of being mutilated by having their hands or arms cut off.

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