Before we arrived in Liberia we’d heard that child rape was happening on a massive and uncontrollable scale – but no one could tell us how many Liberian children become victims each year. In a war-torn country with no mains electricity, no running water and 85% unemployment, the authorities have more immediate concerns than gathering accurate statistics.
Even if it were a priority, it’s unlikely the true number would ever emerge. The majority of victims are raped by relatives or close members of their community, and few ever choose to report their ordeal. One NGO has speculated that up to 10 thousand children must be victims of rape every year – that's in a country with little over three million people. But we knew the only way to get any sense of the scale of the problem was for us to visit Liberia's clinics and safe houses to meet child victims ourselves.
My director Matt Haan and I landed in Monrovia anticipating a hostile reception. Liberians have seen more horrors than we could ever imagine, and we expected them to be tough, hard-bitten survivors who’d have little time for foreign journalists – especially ones asking sensitive questions.
Instead we found people who were open, warm, and pleased that foreigners wanted to hear Liberia’s story. Far from being cynical and broken, Liberians seemed genuinely optimistic. They’re in the process of rebuilding their country and they have high hopes for its future.
I realised how fragile those hopes are as soon as I met six-year-old Mercy. As we sat on the porch of her safe house playing card games, she told me how a ‘big man’ had abducted, imprisoned and raped her three weeks beforehand. Her tiny hands shuffled the cards while her social worker told me about the drugs Mercy has to take to stop her from contracting HIV. The Liberian optimism we’d felt so keenly now seemed misplaced. How can the country move forward if children this young are being habitually and brutally attacked?
While statistics are hard to come by in Liberia, child victims are not. Every clinic and safe house we visited was overwhelmed with them. It became very difficult to hear their stories. Ten year old Ruth told me about how she was kidnapped, gagged and raped over five days in such a calm, matter-of-fact way. It was clear she had little sense of the horrific nature of what had happened to her. She smiled and held my hand while nurses described her injuries to me.
These girls were so young, so obviously children. It was baffling to think that thousands of Liberian men would be prepared to rape them. The civil war alone couldn't explain the problem; the conflict ended six years ago, but the nurses we spoke to said their clinics were seeing more child rape victims every year. While the war may well have made a crisis like this possible, it’s allowed to persist because rapists often go unpunished in a country where it's normal for men to see very young girls as sexual objects.
The charities that run safe houses and sexual violence clinics don’t like to use the word ‘victim’. Instead, they call children who have been raped ‘survivors’. It seemed to me that these girls have no option but to try and survive, in a culture where rape has become a fact of life for thousands of children.
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