Tears of the Desert

 ”At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with
8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures
to go around.”

– Dr. Halima Bashir, a young Darfuri woman whom the Sudanese
authorities have tried to silence by beatings and gang-rape, writing in
her memoir “Tears of the Desert,” which will shortly be published in the
United States, at considerable risk to herself. One day she gave an
interview in which she hinted that the Darfur reality was more
complicated than the Sudanese government version. The authorities
detained her, threatened her, warned her to keep silent and transferred
her to a remote clinic where there were no journalists around to
interview her, she recalls in the book, as cited by New York Times
columnist  Nicholas D. Kristof. Then the janjaweed attacked a girls’
school near Halima’s new clinic and raped dozens of the girls, aged 7 to
13. The first patient Halima tended to was 8 years old. Her face was
bashed in and her insides torn apart. The girl was emitting a haunting
sound: “a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her
throat – over and over again.”

Courtsey:Global Development Briefing

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Pinky Pradhan’s comment

This is one of the worst form of human rights violation. Its beyond my  imagination that world over, its children who have to face the consequences of civil unrest or inadeaquecy of the Government to book the criminals. In India, too, everyday , one gets to read about crime such as rape,sodomy or sexual abuse of minors, as young as six months old.My housemaid’s 3 month old daughter was also not spared. I fear at the very thought of being a mother …