The Walk of Shame

By Frances Harrison-May 18, 2015

When the door was unlocked she scrambled out of the room so fast she left her underwear behind. The Sri Lankan soldiers stood about watching outside  – jeering and abusing her. Head bowed, hair dishevelled, she found herself unable to do up her buttons. Her dress was soaked in blood from where they’d burned and slashed her body, in addition to raping her. It was a walk of shame back into the camp.

Her fellow Tamils instantly knew what had happened but nobody spoke of it. All they could do was give her hungry child water until she’d composed herself enough to breastfeed again.

The soldiers had dragged her out, tortured her and threatened to kill her children if she didn’t stop screaming and trying to resist. She knew what was coming. She’d seen it happen to a young girl the day before. Another mother was told if she didn’t come to be raped they’d take her young daughter instead of her. During the fighting, mothers instinctively shielded their fragile children with their bodies against flying shards of metal. Now in peace they had to go, knowing they would be raped, just to save their children.

Bystanders don’t speak of it. Not just out of respect for the victim but also because they were passive observers, they feel guilty they did nothing to stop it, didn’t even raise a feeble protest. Not that there was anything they could have done while guarded by armed soldiers.

The perpetrators though are brazen about their crimes, filming rapes on mobile phones, photographing the victims naked. They are confident they will never be caught and more than that – they intend to inflict collective shame and humiliation on the whole community. At one level they are raping the Tamil motherland as well as individuals.

It’s of course not just women. War crimes investigators have been shocked by the extent of male rape in post-war Sri Lanka. The victims are timid and fragile, often skinny young men who look more like teenage kids than adults. Some have been detained and abused on multiple occasions starting at a young age.  With great difficulty they recount brutal sexual assaults they are unable ever to tell their families about. One young man was abducted in a white van.

After weeks of sexual and physical abuse his father bribed him out of the army camp where he was being tortured and took him immediately to Mannar to hide before getting on a boat to India. His dad bought some creams from the pharmacy and cleaned his torture wounds applying the creams, weeping as he did it that he’d been unable to protect his precious child. The son lay on the bed in pain, not telling his father about the sexual abuse because he wanted to protect someone he loved from the whole horrible truth.

It was a scene of great tenderness after terrible brutality and cruelty but there was also a permanent barrier placed between the parent and child that they would never be able to remove. Soon the son was away, alone in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language, terrified even to phone home lest it cause problems for his family. More barriers erected even across continents. Who do you turn to in trouble but your family – even that relationship has been degraded by the torturers.

Another torture survivor described being dropped off for the exchange in a deserted jungle area. His uncle handed over a bag of money. They drove off to a safe house, stopping only so his uncle could examine his wounds in the headlight of the vehicle. That’s how much time there was to make sure he was alright. Nobody goes to a doctor because it’s too dangerous. Men who have been branded all over their backs with hot metal rods describe the pain of sitting in airplane seat for hours on end, flying to safety. They can’t lean back in the seat.

Six years after the end of the war in Sri Lanka I could not have imagined such victims would still be emerging abroad. When I wrote a book of survivors’ stories from the end of the war in 2009 many people said they struggled with the horror and could only bear to read one chapter at a time. I now know it was the lite version of the war. Those people I interviewed in 2011 had escaped relatively quickly. Now there are people who’ve suffered not just months of displacement, bereavement, injury, starvation and trauma but years of detention, torture and sexual abuse, in “rehabilitation camps” and then on top of that white van abductions after they have been ‘rehabilitated’, only to restart their cycle of detention, repeated and prolonged torture and sexual abuse, yet again. Their suffering is quite literally indescribable.

They arrive abroad and some go straight from the airport to the detention centre, never stepping foot in the country outdoors. Being locked up again is traumatic. They suffer flashbacks and wake up at night screaming because they think they’re back in Sri Lanka in the torture cell.

Many are men who leave their wives and children behind in the Vanni. They live in limbo waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, constantly worrying about their families being threatened by the security forces and always in fear of being rejected and sent back to Sri Lanka for more ‘rehabilitation’.

Reprisals and threats against family members left at home in Sri Lanka are common. One man described how his wife was detained by the security forces and gang raped because they couldn’t find him. He returned home and saw her ripped clothes, the bite and scratch marks on her breasts. He took her to hospital where she was put in intensive care. After that first day he and his wife never discussed it again. Another barrier erected in their marriage.

For all the wedges driven between people, there are many strong Tamil women who overcome the personal trauma and the social stigma of rape with the help of loving men who support them. Several I know have recently married and had babies. They’ve decided the best way to defeat their torturers is to try to be happy again. That requires extraordinary individual courage but be under no illusion that it implies forgiveness or reconciliation. It’s hard to imagine someone in this situation would not harbour deep-seated anger and hatred for those who still deny their attempted mental and physical obliteration.  Reconciliation has to be about a lot more than which language you use to sing the national anthem.

(Frances Harrison is a former BBC Colombo Correspondent who has been documenting torture and sexual violence in post-war Sri Lanka and wrote a book about the survivors of the final phase of the civil war, Still Counting the Dead, Portobello, London 2012.)