‘A living hell’: Sudanese women face rape and abuse in Libya

“We are living in terror so that no one can hear,” Laila whispers into the phone. She fled Sudan with her husband and six children early last year in search of safety and is now in Libya.

Like all the Sudanese women the BBC spoke to about their experiences of being trafficked to Libya, her name has been changed to protect her identity.

WARNING: This story contains details that some people may find disturbing.

In a trembling voice she describes how her home in Omdurman was raided during Sudan’s violent civil war that erupted in 2023.

The family first went to Egypt before paying smugglers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya, where they were told life would be better and they could find jobs in cleaning and hospitality.

But as soon as they crossed the border, Laila says the smugglers took them hostage, beat them and demanded more money.

“My son needed medical care after being hit repeatedly in the face,” she tells the BBC.

The smugglers released him after three days without giving any reason. Laila thought her new life in Libya was getting better after having a family. managed to travel westwards And he rented a room and started working.

But one day her husband went away in search of work and never returned. Then a man known to the family because of Laila’s job raped her 19-year-old daughter.

“He told my daughter that if she told him about what he did to her, he would rape her younger sister,” says Laila.

She says in a hushed voice that she fears the family will be evicted if her landlady finds out about the threats.

Laila says they are now stuck in Libya: they have no money left to pay smugglers to get out of there and can’t return to war-torn Sudan.

“We barely have food,” she says, adding that her children do not go to school. “My son is afraid to leave the house because other kids often beat him and insult him for being black. I think I’m losing my mind.”

Millions of people have fled Sudan since the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in 2023. The two sides jointly staged a coup in 2021, but a power struggle between their commanders plunged the country into civil war.

Experts say more than 12 million people have been forced from their homes, while famine has spread across five regions, with 24.6 million people – almost half the population – in urgent need of food aid.

The UN refugee agency says more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees are now in Libya.

The BBC has spoken to five Sudanese families who initially went to Egypt, where they said they faced racism and violence, before moving to Libya, where they believed it would be safer with better job opportunities. will be. We contacted him through a researcher on migration and asylum seeker issues in Libya.

Salma told the BBC that she was living in Cairo, Egypt with her husband and three children when the Sudanese civil war broke out, but as large numbers of refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants there worsened.

They decided to go to Libya, says Salma, but there “living hell” awaited them.

She describes how, as soon as they crossed the border, they were kept in a warehouse run by smugglers. They wanted the money that had been paid in advance to smugglers on the Egyptian side of the border, but it never arrived.

His family spent about two months in the warehouse. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and taken to a room for women and children. Here, she says that she and her two elder children were subjected to various forms of cruelty because they wanted money.

“Their whips left marks on our bodies. They beat my daughter and put my son’s hands in a burning oven while I was watching.

“Sometimes I wanted us all to die together. I couldn’t think of any other way.”

Salma says her son and daughter are traumatized by the experience and have been suffering from incontinence ever since. Then she lowers her voice.

“They would take me to a different room, the ‘rape room’, with different men each time,” she says. “I’m going to give birth to one of them.”

Eventually, he raised some money through a friend in Egypt and the smugglers released the family.

She says a doctor then told her it was too late to have an abortion, and when her husband discovered she was pregnant he abandoned her and the children, leaving them to sleep at night, in the garbage. Ate leftover food from cans and begged on the street.

He found refuge for a time on a remote farm in north-western Libya, where he spent entire days with little or no food. He quenched his thirst by drinking contaminated water from a nearby well.

“It breaks my heart to hear my (elder) son say that he is literally dying of hunger,” Salma says over the phone.

“He’s very hungry,” she says, “but I don’t have anything to feed him, I don’t even have enough milk in my breasts.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her 40s, also believed reports from the Sudanese community that a better life awaited them in Libya.

She fled unrest in Sudan’s western region of Darfur in 2014 and spent several years in Egypt before moving to Libya in late 2023. She says her daughters have since been raped repeatedly – ​​they were 19 and 20 when it first happened.

She tells the BBC, “I sent them to do cleaning work when I was sick; they came back at night covered in dirt and blood – four men raped them until one of them was unconscious. It’s not done.”

Jamila says she was raped and held captive for several weeks by a man much younger than her, who had offered her a job cleaning his house.

She recalls, “He called me a ‘disgusting black.’ He raped me and said, ‘That’s what women are made for.’

“Even the children here are bad to us, they treat us like animals and sorcerers, they insult us for being black and African, aren’t they Africans themselves?” Jamila says.

When her daughters were raped for the first time, Jamila took them to the hospital and informed the police. But when the police officer realized they were refugees, Jameela says he withdrew the report and warned her she would be jailed if a complaint was filed officially. It was in the west of Libya.

Libya is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees – and considers refugees and asylum seekers as “illegal migrants”.

According to the human rights group Libya Crimes Watch, the country is divided into two parts, each run by a separate government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east because they can file official complaints without being detained, and have access to health care. Can be reached more easily. ,

While sexual violence is common within informal facilities run by traffickers, there is also evidence that abuses are occurring in official detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.

Hana, a Sudanese woman who works collecting plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, says she was kidnapped in western Libya and taken into the jungle and shot by a group of men at gunpoint. Raped her at the tip of.

The next day his attackers took him to a facility run by the state-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hanna why she was detained.

“While I was watching, young men and boys were beaten and forced to take off their clothes completely,” Hana told the BBC.

“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor with my head over my plastic slippers. After begging for hours they would let me go to the toilet. I was beaten on the head again and again.”

There have been several previous reports of abuse of migrants from other African countries in Libya. The country is an important stepping stone on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to had planned to travel there.

In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSA of “unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, detention and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, forced labor and other shocking human rights violations and crimes under international law”.

The report said Interior Ministry officials in the capital, Tripoli, told Amnesty that the ministry had no oversight over the SSA because it answers to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeih, whose office did not respond to our request for comment. Gave.

Libya Crime Watch has told the BBC that systemic sexual abuse of migrants occurs in official migrant detention centres, including Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison.

In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said there were “an increasing number of reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic strip-searches and intimate body searches” at Abu Salim.

The minister of interior affairs and the department to combat illegal migration in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.

Salma has now left the farm and moved into a new room with another family nearby, but she and her family still face the threat of eviction and abuse.

She says she can’t go back home because of what happened to her.

“They used to say I was a shame to the family,” she says. I’m not sure they’ll even welcome my dead body.” “I wish I knew what awaits me here.”