Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

“We’re living in fear,” Layla whispers into the phone so that no one can hear. She fled Sudan with her husband and six children early last year for 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 article contains content that some may find offensive.

In a trembling voice he describes how his house in Omdurman was confiscated during the violent civil war in Sudan, which began in 2023.

The family first traveled to Egypt before paying traffickers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya, where they were told life would be better and they would find work as a cleaner and hospitality worker.

But as soon as they crossed the border, Layla says the traffickers caught them, beat them and asked them for a lot of money.

“My son needs medical attention after being repeatedly punched in the face,” she told the BBC.

The sellers released them three days later, without saying why. Layla thought that her new life in Libya was getting better after the family managed to travel west and he rented a room and started working.

But one day her husband went to look for a job and never came back. Then her 19-year-old daughter was raped by a man who was known in the family because of Layla’s work.

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

They keep quiet for fear that the family will be evicted if the landlord hears the threats.

Layla says she is now trapped in Libya: she has no money left to pay the traffickers to leave and cannot return to war-torn Sudan.

“We lack food,” he says, adding that his children are not in school. “My son is afraid to leave the house because other children often beat him and mock him for being black. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Millions have fled Sudan since the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in 2023. The two sides agreed to take over the government in 2021, but fierce clashes between their leaders plunged the country into civil war.

More than 12 million people have been displaced, as famine has spread across five regions, with 24.6 million people – nearly half the population – in urgent need of aid, experts say.

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

The BBC has spoken to five Sudanese families who first went to Egypt, where they said they faced discrimination and violence, before moving to Libya, hoping for better conditions and job opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher on migration and asylum seekers in Libya.

Salma told the BBC that she was already living in Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and three children when Sudan’s civil war began, but as more refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants there worsened.

They decided to move to Libya, but what awaited them there was “a living hell,” Salma says.

He explains how, after crossing the border, he put them in a warehouse where people sell them. The men wanted the money they had paid in advance to the Egyptian border smugglers, but it did not arrive.

His family spent almost two months in the warehouse. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and went to the room for women and children. Here, he says that he and his two eldest children were subjected to various abuses because of the money.

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

“Sometimes I wished we would all die together.

Salma says her son and daughter were traumatized by the incident and have been struggling with incontinence ever since. Then he lowers his voice.

“They took me to a special room, a ‘rape room’ with different men all the time,” she says. “I give birth to the child of one of them.”

Eventually, he found money through a friend in Egypt and the businessmen freed the family.

She says the doctor told her it was time to abort the pregnancy, and when her husband found out she was pregnant he left her and the children, leaving them sleeping, eating leftovers and begging on the streets.

He fled to a remote farm in northwest Libya for a while, going days without food. They quenched their thirst by drinking dirty water from a nearby well.

“It breaks my heart to hear mine [older] The child says he is starving,” Salma says over the phone, her son’s cries echoing in the background.

“He is hungry,” he says, “but I have nothing, not even enough milk in my breasts to feed him.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her mid-40s, also believed local Sudanese reports that a better life awaits in Libya.

She fled the previous conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region in 2014 and spent many years in Egypt before moving to Libya in late 2023. She says her daughters have been repeatedly raped since then – they were 19 and 20 the first time.

“I sent them to work cleaning and I got sick; they came back at night covered in dirt and blood – four men beat them until one of them passed out,” he told the BBC.

Jamila says she was also raped and tied up for several weeks by a man, younger than her, who gave her a job cleaning her house.

He used to call me an ‘ugly black man.’ He raped me and said, ‘This is what women are made of,’” she recalls.

“Even the children here treat us badly, they treat us as monsters and witches, they mock us because we are black people and Africans, aren’t we Africans?” Jamila said.

When her daughters were first raped, Jamila took them to the hospital and reported it to the police. But when the officer realized that they were refugees, Jamila says he withdrew the report and warned her that she would be jailed if a complaint was filed. This was in western Libya.

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

The country is divided into two parts, each controlled by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east because they can complain without arrest, and get medical care easily, according to the human rights group Libya Crimes Watch. .

Although sexual violence is common in informal settlements run by traffickers, there is also evidence that violence is taking place in detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.

A Sudanese woman, Hanaa, who works to collect plastic bottles from the bin to feed her children, says that she was kidnapped in western Libya and taken to the forest where a group of people raped her at gunpoint.

The next day his attackers took him to a facility run by the government’s Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hanaa why they locked her up.

“Boys and young men were beaten and forced to take off their clothes and look,” Hanaa told the BBC.

“I stayed there for days. I slept on the floor, resting my head on my plastic slippers. They let me go to the toilet after hours of begging. I was beaten repeatedly on the head.”

There have been several previous reports of African migrants being abused in Libya. The country is an important stop on the route to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to were planning to go there.

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

The report says that officials of the Ministry of Interior in the capital Tripoli told Amnesty that the ministry does not have control over the SSA as it answers to the prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose office did not respond to our request.

Libya Crimes Watch has told the BBC that sexual abuse of refugees takes place in refugee detention facilities, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) noted that “the number of reports of sexual and domestic violence, including systematic stripping and body searches and rape” in Abu Salim.

The Interior Minister and the Anti-Irregular Migration Department in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.

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

He says he can’t go back home because of what happened to him.

“I am bringing shame to the family, they will say. I am not sure they will even accept my body,” he says. “I wish I knew what was waiting for me here.”