Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

“We live in fear,” Leila whispered over the phone, so as not to be overheard. She fled Sudan with her husband and six children early last year seeking safety and is now in Libya. She used a pseudonym to protect her identity, as did all the Sudanese women interviewed by the BBC who shared their experiences of being trafficked to Libya.

She explained in a trembling voice that her home in Omdurman was attacked during the Sudanese civil war that erupted in 2023. The family first went to Egypt, then paid people smugglers $350 (about £338) to take them to Libya. They were told that life would be better there, and they could find work in cleaning and hospitality.

However, Leila said that as soon as they crossed the border, the people smugglers held them hostage, beat them, and demanded more money. “My son needed medical treatment because he was hit in the face multiple times,” she told the BBC. Three days later, the smugglers released them for no reason. Leila thought her new life in Libya was starting to improve, and the family managed to move west, where she rented a room and started working.

But one day, her husband went out to look for work and never returned. Later, her 19-year-old daughter was raped by a man she had met through Leila’s work. “He told my daughter that if she spoke about what he did to her, he would rape her younger sister,” Leila said. She spoke in hushed tones, afraid that if the landlord heard the threat, her family would be evicted.

Leila said they are now trapped in Libya: they have no money to pay smugglers to leave and cannot return to war-torn Sudan. “We barely have any food,” she said, adding that her children are not going to school. “My son is afraid to go outside because other children regularly beat him and insult him because he is black. I feel like I am going mad.”

Millions of people have fled Sudan since the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out in 2023. The two sides jointly staged a coup in 2021, but a power struggle between commanders plunged the country into civil war. Experts say that more than 12 million people have been forced to leave their homes, famine has spread across five regions, and about 24.6 million people – about half of the population – are in dire need of food aid.

The UN Refugee Agency says there are now more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees in Libya. The BBC spoke to five Sudanese families who had initially gone to Egypt, where they said they experienced racism and violence, before moving to Libya, thinking it would be safer and have better work opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher in Libya who studies migration and asylum issues.

Salma told the BBC that when the Sudanese civil war broke out, she was already living in Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and three children, but as large numbers of refugees flooded into the country, the situation for migrants there worsened. They decided to move to Libya, but what awaited them was "hell on earth," Salma said. She described how as soon as they crossed the border, they were placed in a warehouse run by people smugglers. These men wanted the money that had been paid to the smugglers on the Egyptian side of the border upfront, but it had never arrived.

Her family was kept in the warehouse for nearly two months. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and taken to a room for women and children. Here, she said, she and her two older children suffered all kinds of abuse because they wanted money. “They left marks on us with their whips. They would beat my daughter and put my son’s hand in a lit oven while I watched.”

“Sometimes I wished we would all just die together. I couldn’t see any other way out,” Salma said, adding that her son and daughter were traumatized by the experience and have since suffered from incontinence. Then she lowered her voice. “They would take me to a separate room, a ‘rape room’ with different men each time,” she said. “I am pregnant with one of their children.”

Eventually, she raised some money through a friend in Egypt, and the smugglers released her family. She said a doctor later told her it was too late for an abortion, and when her husband found out she was pregnant, he abandoned her and the children, leaving them to sleep on the streets, eat from bins, and beg in the streets. They took refuge for a while on a remote farm in north-western Libya, where they barely had any food all day. They drank contaminated water from a nearby well to quench their thirst.

“It broke my heart to hear my [older] son say that he was really close to starving,” Salma said on the phone, with the sound of her baby crying growing louder in the background. “He was so hungry,” she said, “but I had nothing, not even enough breast milk to feed him.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her 40s, also believed reports within the Sudanese community that a better life awaited them in Libya. She had fled previous unrest in the Darfur region of western Sudan in 2014 and spent a few years in Egypt before moving to Libya at the end of 2023. She said her daughters have been raped multiple times since then – they were 19 and 20 when it first happened. “I sent them to clean when I was sick; they came back at night covered in mud and blood – four men raped them until one of them fainted,” she told the BBC.

Jamila said she was also raped and held prisoner for weeks by a much younger man who had offered her work cleaning his house. “He used to call me ‘disgusting black woman’. He raped me, saying ‘this is what women are for’,” she recalled. “Even the children here are very cruel to us, they treat us like beasts and sorcerers, they insult us because we are black and African, aren’t they African themselves?” Jamila said.

When her daughters were first raped, Jamila took them to the hospital and reported it to the police. But when the police officer realized they were refugees, Jamila said he withdrew the report and warned her that she would be imprisoned if she made a formal complaint. This happened in western Libya. Libya is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and treats refugees and asylum seekers as "illegal immigrants."

The country is divided into two parts, each run by a different government, but the human rights group Libya Crimes Watch says that the situation is easier for migrants in the east, where they can make formal complaints without being detained and have better access to healthcare. While sexual violence is common in unofficial facilities run by people smugglers, there is also evidence of abuse in official detention centers in Libya, especially in the west.

Hana, a Sudanese woman who is surviving by collecting plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, said that she was kidnapped in western Libya, taken to a forest, and raped at gunpoint by a group of men. The next day, her attackers took her to a facility run by the state-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hana why she was being detained. “Young men and boys were beaten and forced to completely undress while I watched,” Hana told the BBC.

“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor, using my plastic slippers as a pillow. They would only let me go to the toilet after I had begged for hours. I was hit on the head multiple times.” There have been numerous reports of migrants from other African countries being abused in Libya. The country is a key springboard to Europe, although none of the women interviewed by the BBC had 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 labour and other shocking violations of human rights and crimes under international law”. The report noted that officials in the interior ministry in the capital, Tripoli, told Amnesty International that the interior ministry had no oversight of the SSA, as it reports to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.

Libya Crimes Watch told the BBC that there is systematic sexual abuse of migrants in official migrant detention centers, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there were “increasing reports of sexual and physical violence (including systematic strip searches and intimate body searches as well as rape)” in Abu Salim. The interior minister and the department for combating illegal immigration in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.

Salma has now left the farm and moved to a new room with another family nearby, but she and her family still face the threat of eviction and abuse. She says she cannot go home because of what happened to her. “I would bring shame on my family, they would say. I’m not sure they would welcome even my dead body,” she said. “If only I had known what awaited me here.”