Unreported World reveals how Liberia is facing a child rape crisis.
Six years after the end of a brutal civil war in which rape was routinely used as a weapon, children still face the daily fear of being attacked, and the West African country's hospitals are overwhelmed with child victims, a quarter of them under four years old.
In the Liberian capital, Monrovia, reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Matt Haan meet Mercy, a six-year-old girl who was abducted and raped by a stranger two weeks previously. Mercy is taking a course of drugs to try to stop her from contracting HIV. She lives in a safe house run by a Liberian charity, which is filled with other child rape victims.
Maryam, Mercy's social worker, tells Kleeman many of these children can never go home. Child victims are often ostracised by their communities, she says, and when the perpetrator is a relative, which is often the case, the child is seen to have disgraced the family by reporting the rape.
The team visits a children's hospital run by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières. Elias Abi-Aad tells Kleeman that his unit saw 771 child rape victims in 2008 and in the first six months of 2009 had already seen 422 victims, but he estimates this is only a small fraction of the total number of cases in Liberia. Victims suffer serious medical problems as a result of their ordeal and the hospital saw three recent cases where children died as a direct consequence of rape.
Click here to read more about the Unreported World report on the Channel 4 website
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