Study Documents War-Time Sex Abuse in Sierra Leone
Originally published by Reuters Health, January 22, 2002
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Human rights violations, including widespread sexual assault, have plagued displaced civilians in the war-torn African nation of Sierra Leone, a new study shows.
Throughout the 1990s, government and rebel forces in Sierra Leone were involved in clashes that displaced possibly more than 1 million people. Systematic abuse of civilians, including murder, rape and mutilation, have been attributed primarily to the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
Sierra Leone has the world's highest infant and child death rates and lowest life expectancy at 38 years. It is currently home to the world's largest United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission.
To help document the human rights abuses that have occurred there, researchers led by Dr. Lynn L. Amowitz of Physicians for Human Rights in Boston, Massachusetts, interviewed displaced citizens at camps and other locales in Sierra Leone. Nearly 1,000 women were asked about human rights abuses their families had endured.
The researchers found that 13% of family members had been victims of war-related abuses, including abductions, beatings and murder. Nine percent of the 991 women interviewed had been sexually assaulted, according to findings published in The Journal of the American Medical Association for January 23/30.
Overall, the RUF was blamed for 40% of the abuses. Other rebels and current and former members of the Sierra Leone Army were also identified as perpetrators.
"The findings in this study,'' writes Amowitz's team, ''indicate that rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by combatants in Sierra Leone were widespread and perpetrated in the context of a high level of human rights abuses against the civilian population.''
Documenting such crimes, they add, is essential in helping the survivors of sexual assault and in "holding perpetrators accountable.''
The researchers also note that although most women they interviewed said that greater protection of women's rights was needed, more than half also said it was acceptable for a husband to beat his wife and that it was a "wife's duty'' to have sex with her husband even if she did not want to.
"The apparent disparity between such beliefs and international principles of human rights suggests a need for public discourse and education on local, regional, and international levels,'' Amowitz and colleagues conclude.
