Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

Hanaa, a Sudanese woman who works collecting plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, says she was kidnapped in western Libya and taken to the forest and raped at gunpoint by a group of men.

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

“Young men and boys were beaten and forced to take off their clothes as I watched,” Hanaa told the BBC.

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

There have been many previous reports of migrants from other African countries being mistreated in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to planned to travel there.

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

The report said that an official of the Ministry of Interior in the capital, Tripoli, told Amnesty that the ministry has no oversight in the SSA because it answers to the prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.

Libya Crimes Watch has told the BBC that systemic sexual abuse of migrants is taking place in official migrant detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there were “numerous reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic searches and searches of intimate bodies and rape” in Abu Salim.

The Ministry of Interior and the Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Tripoli did not respond to our request.

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

He said he can’t go back home because of what happened.

“I bring shame to the family, they will say. I’m not sure they will even welcome my dead body,” he said. “If only I knew what was waiting for me here.”