Migrants and refugees who travel to Italy face a high risk of sexual violence both during the journey and after they arrive. Among the victims are men and boys, yet their stories are not often heard.
A report by the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) details some of their testimonies of suffering.
On the border between Algeria and Libya this incident was reported to a health worker by a man from Ivory Coast called Paul*: “Armed uniformed men took [Paul’s] friend away. When his friend came back, tears were leaking on his face. They wereviolent in his anus, not with a stick, with a real p*nis,” Paul told the health worker. Paul was traveling with his wife and his friend. Paul says he “cries every time he thinks about [the incident] now;” he also couldn’t tell his wife what had happened because “he was afraid that she would think it had also happened to him.”
Paul’s testimony is one of many equally upsetting accounts featured in the report “More Than One Million Pains”, by Sarah Chynoweth, the WRC’s sexual violence project director.
A health worker describes one testimony from a 24-year-old man from Sierra Leone who was held in Beni Walid, in an unofficial detention center. Because of the overcrowded conditions, this man said “when [the guards] couldn’t extort the prisoners anymore, they would initiate a ‘cleaning out’ saying ‘it’s time to clean the prison and have a bath.’
They would line up the men and women naked. The women had to masturbate the men. They were forced to do everything to make the man erect. If the men became erect, the guards would cut their penis off. If there was no erection, they would rape the woman with a stick. He said that no woman survived that – they’d rape her until she bled to death.”
Source; Info Migrants
