Hanaa, a Sudanese woman who works collecting plastic bottles from dumpsters to feed her children, says she was abducted in western Libya and taken to a forest where a group of men raped her at gunpoint.
The next day, the attackers took her to a facility run by the state-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hanaa why she was detained.
“Young people and boys were beaten and forced to take off their clothes completely while I watched,” Hanaa told the BBC.
“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor with my head resting on plastic slippers. I was allowed to go to the toilet after many hours of begging. I was hit on the head several times.”
There have been numerous reports of ill-treatment of migrants from other African countries in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to had any plans to go there.
In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSA of “unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, interception and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, forced labor and other shocking human rights violations and crimes under international law”.
The report said Interior Ministry officials in the capital Tripoli told Amnesty that the ministry does not control the SSA as it reports to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.
Libya Crimes Watch has told the BBC that systematic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official migrant detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
In the 2023 report. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there had been “increased reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic strip and intimate searches, and rape” in Abu Salim.
The Interior Minister and Tripoli’s Anti-Illegal Migration Department did not respond to our request for comment.
Salma has now left the farm and moved into a new room with another family nearby, but she and her family still face the threat of eviction and abuse.
She says she can’t go home because of what happened to her.
“I bring shame to the family, they would say. I’m not sure they would even welcome my dead body,” she says. “If only I knew what was waiting for me here.”
