INITIATIVE: Breaking the Silence: Confronting Rape in Post-War Libya

After thirty years abroad, Amal* returned to Libya in early 2011 to join the armed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, the country's former leader. On her first day on the front line she met a 17-year-old girl who had been gang-raped by Gaddafi soldiers. Her injuries were so severe she would eventually undergo seven operations but the soldiers had filmed her attack and "she was so afraid the film would come out," Amal tells me, her voice choked with emotion, "that she forgot her pain; she felt it didn't matter to her." The girl feared that if the film became public she could face lifelong social stigma and risk imprisonment, or even death.

Amal spent the next eight months of fighting assisting women who were raped during the conflict. Then, when Gaddafi was overthrown and a fragile peace was restored in October 2011, she founded a network of rape crisis centres across Western Libya, in partnership with Amica, a German aid organisation that supports women in postconflict areas.

These centres cannot operate openly – instead, each one also offers IT, English or handicrafts courses to provide a cover for rape victims using the unadvertised counselling and healthcare services.

Despite her efforts to keep victims' identities secret, Amal says two women she has helped were murdered by close relatives when they found out – killed because they were seen to bring dishonour to the family. There are no statistics on the rate of honour killings in Libya, but the legal system implicitly legitimises the practice: the penalty for murder is reduced if the defendant successfully argues they were preserving family honour.

Before the revolution, rape survivors who spoke out were also often forced to marry their rapist or were imprisoned. This appears to be less common now. Amica has intervened once when a Libyan charity imprisoned a rape victim, but Diana Eltahawy, an Amnesty International researcher currently visiting Libyan prisons, says she is not aware of any female rape victims behind bars today.

Nevertheless, there are still strong disincentives against speaking out, making it hard for victims to access help or to seek justice. This also makes it difficult to assess the scale of the problem in Libya.

"I want the world to know that Gaddafi used rape as a weapon," Amal says. "It was organised and systematic." Although Amnesty International said in June 2011 that it had found no evidence of mass rape, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, wrote in his report to the UN Security Council that, 'information and evidence indicates at this stage that hundreds of rapes occurred during the conflict.' Around 2,700 people are using Amica's rape crisis centres.

Post-conflict, sexual violence against women seems to have increased. Laila Bugaighis is a consultant gynaecologist and deputy head of Benghazi Medical Centre, in Eastern Libya. "We see more [rape] cases now than we saw during the war," she tells me. She treats around four cases a month and believes this is just the tip of the iceberg: "There are large numbers unaccounted for. We hear stories and we go out, but when we get there no one will speak." Bugaighis blames this rise in rape on Libya's continued lawlessness, and the government's inability to rein in heavily-armed militias.

It's "quite common" for sexual violence to increase in post-conflict settings, says Nadje Al-Ali, an expert on gender and the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. "Historically and cross-culturally, there's a close relationship between the militarisation of society and an increase in gender-based violence." She has found that following conflict, an absence of law and order makes streets less safe for women, and that both domestic and sexual violence often increase when men return from war.

One requisite for tackling gender-based violence, and the first step to justice and reconciliation, is talking about it, says Al-Ali. "There has to be a very clear message from the political leadership, but that is never sufficient; you need a big educational, consciousness-raising campaign – community leaders, religious leaders, schools, universities, media, civil society and women's groups all have a role." The problem is that sexual violence remains a taboo subject in many countries, including Libya, and women's rights are rarely given high priority by overstretched post-war governments.

Women's rights organisations in Libya are doing their best to keep sexual violence on the political agenda, but it's not easy. In 2011, Bugaighis set up the National Protection Against Violence Committee to lobby for change. She is pushing for an end to the imprisonment of rape victims, the establishment of shelters for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, and better legal protection for women. So far, she is frustrated by the government response. "We've been speaking to the Ministry of Justice since 2011, and to this day nothing's been done," she says.

On top of this, a number of women's rights activists have been forcibly silenced.

Magdulien Abaida, 26, began campaigning for women's rights during the revolution. In August 2011, she was kidnapped by revolutionary militia, who accused her of "trying to destroy morals, and Islamic rules, and driving women to be bad." She was held for three days and tortured.

We meet in London, where she has claimed asylum, fearing for her life. "After me, they are attacking many women. They are attacking women who are secular and open-minded," she explains, referring to Libya's growing Islamist movement. She says many of her fellow women's rights campaigners have either fled abroad or now maintain a low profile.

This February, an 18-year-old girl was raped while she lay in a coma in a hospital in Libya's capital, Tripoli. In response, women's groups organised a protest march in the city, demanding an end to sexual harassment and violence and a full investigation into the case.

Around 40 took to the streets – "which was a success, because we thought it would be 20, there are no women who would go out and talk about sexual harassment," says Asma Khalifa, an NGO worker who was on the march.

"We were very badly harassed in the street; they were calling us 'sluts' and telling us to go home, and that we were bad women," she says. She had been expecting this reaction, so I ask her why she persevered. Her reply is simple, but powerful: "We need to. I have to. The more voices are hushed, the more damage is done."

*Not her real name