Mogadishu--After 14-year-old Fatima was raped by a tuk-tuk driver, she was arrested, detained for a month and raped repeatedly by a police officer, according to the child and her aunt.
Sexual violence is widespread in Somalia and rarely prosecuted. If anyone is punished at all it is often the victim, not the perpetrator.
"We are fighting to change that attitude of blaming the victims," said Fartuun Adan, who runs the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre in the Somali capital Mogadishu, where survivors of sexual violence can find refuge, medical care and support.
"There must be consequences for men who rape," she said, but instead those who report rape are frequently arrested themselves.
When it comes to rape cases in the socially conservative Horn of Africa nation, blaming the victim is the norm -- and there have been no consequences for Fatima's uniformed attackers.
A slight girl no more than five feet (150 centimetres) tall, she lives in one of the squalid camps for the uprooted that dot the city. The UN children's agency UNICEF says young women and girls in the camps are "systematically preyed upon", frequently by armed personnel.
Last year the advocacy group Human Rights Watch accused some members of the 22,000 African Union force in Somalia of rape and sexual exploitation.
When not attending the Islamic madrassa that substitutes for school, Fatima (not her real name) and her aunt would make and sell sweets.
One slow day she got in a motorised rickshaw or tuk-tuk with a plan to try selling her sweets in another part of town, but the driver took her to a quiet spot and raped her instead.
Hearing the commotion, police arrested both the girl and her attacker. Soon afterwards the man was released and Fatima was accused of being a prostitute. "The police arrested me, they blamed me," she said, her voice a whisper.
Fatima's aunt spent a month seeking her release. The officers would joke when she visited, telling her they were training Fatima to work for them as a cleaner. Fatima had become uncharacteristically taciturn, telling her aunt to abandon her, to "consider her already dead".
Fatima's aunt said she reported what was happening to the authorities.
"They said I shouldn't talk like that and must leave," she said. Fatima was released after the Elman Centre intervened but she was traumatised by the experience and still faces the threat of a court appearance for prostitution.
"She used to be full of life and joy," said Fatima's aunt. "She's not the same person anymore."
AFP
