humanitarian news and analysis UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (IRIN)
Children targeted: Local media report at least two incidents of the rape of girls as young as five years of age every week, and a recent study at a hospital in the capital, Monrovia, by international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), showed that teenage girls were more exposed to rape in the capital. An estimated 85 percent of the 658 rape survivors reporting to the hospital were aged under 18, while 48 percent were aged between 5 and 12 years. "In more than 90 percent of the cases involving children, they were raped by someone they knew," MSF said. Antoinette Nebo, a community leader in West Point, one of Monrovia's slums, confirmed that sexual offenders, who were usually in their forties, often targeted "baby girls". She said poverty was the main reason why girls were being raped. "They [cash-strapped parents] sometimes extort money from the perpetrators to privately settle the case without going through the courts system. It is a shared act of total wickedness by heartless persons to rape our young girls, and most of the victims' parents or guardians are ... [complicit in] rape cases." Liberia has an unemployment rate of 85 percent and is one of the world's poorest countries, with most of the population living on less than US$1 a day, according to the World Development Index. The growing trend towards transactional sex between older, financially stable men and young women and even younger girls has drawn the attention of President Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, who issued a warning to rape perpetrators in December 2006. For full report check this website: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=64306
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