The Ebola Rape Epidemic No One’s Talking About
When the outbreak hit West Africa, fevers spiked – and so did rates of teenage pregnancy.
BY FEBRUARY 2, 2016MONROVIA, Liberia — When the Ebola epidemic reached its peak in Liberia in September 2014, Tina Williams was 14 years old, five months pregnant, and feverish. She had been raped and abandoned by her boyfriend. Now she lay in bed shivering and praying that she was sick with malaria, not Ebola.
Williams and her baby girl later tested negative for Ebola, but they were Ebola survivors of a different kind. As the virus swept across West Africa infecting nearly 30,000 people, so did another contagion: outbreaks of rape, sexual assault, and violence against women and girls.
While public health workers tallied the number of Ebola-infected patients, girls like Williams who were victims of gender-based violence went uncounted.Only now are we learning that Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone saw a surge in teenage pregnancy likely caused by an increase in the incidence of rape during the epidemic.
In parts of Sierra Leone, the teenage pregnancy rate increased 65 percent during the Ebola epidemic, according to a study by the United Nations Development Program. Data on rape and teenage pregnancy in the region is hard to obtain because of under-reporting. But studies by Plan International andSave the Children documented increases in teenage pregnancy ranging from 10 to 65 percent in Ebola-affected countries.
The surge is no coincidence. Outbreaks of infectious diseases often leave girls and women vulnerable to violence and rape — a result of the civil unrest and instability that epidemics leave in their wake. “This wouldn’t come as a surprise if we thought of epidemics like any other disaster,” said Monica Onyango, a clinical assistant professor of global health at Boston University. “Epidemics are just like a conflict situation. You have a loss of governance; you have chaos and instability; and all of that leaves women vulnerable to gender-based violence.”
