“We live in terror,” Layla whispers over the phone so no one can hear. She fled Sudan with her husband and six children early last year in search of safety and is now in Libya.
Like all Sudanese women the BBC spoke to about their experiences of being trafficked to Libya, her name has been changed to protect her identity.
Warning: This story contains details that some may find disturbing.
In a trembling voice, she explains how her home in Omdurman was attacked during Sudan’s violent civil war that broke out in 2023.
The family first went to Egypt before paying traffickers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya, where they were told life would be better and they could find jobs in cleaning and catering.
But as soon as they crossed the border, Layla says the traffickers held them hostage, beat them and demanded more money.
“My son needed medical attention after being punched repeatedly in the face,” she told the BBC.
The traders released them after three days, without saying why. Layla thought her new life in Libya was starting to get better after her family managed to travel west and she rented a room and started working.
But one day her husband went to look for work and never came back. Then her 19-year-old daughter was raped by a man known to the family through Layla’s work.
“He told my daughter he would rape her little sister if she spoke about what he did to her,” says Layla.
He speaks in a low tone, fearing that the family will be evicted if their landlady hears about the threats.
Layla says they are now trapped in Libya: they have no more money to pay the traffickers to leave and cannot return to war-torn Sudan.
“We hardly have anything to eat,” she says, adding that her children do not go to school. “My son is afraid to leave the house because the other kids often beat him and insult him for being black. I feel like I’m going crazy.”
Millions have fled Sudan since war broke out in 2023 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF). The two sides staged a joint coup in 2021, but a power struggle between their commanders plunged the country into civil war.
More than 12 million people have been forced from their homes, while famine has spread across five territories, with 24.6 million people – around half the population – in urgent need of food aid, experts say.
The UN refugee agency says more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees are now in Libya.
The BBC spoke to five Sudanese families who initially went to Egypt, where they said they experienced racism and violence, before moving to Libya, believing it would be safer with better job opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher on migration issues and asylum seekers in Libya.
Salma tells the BBC that she was already living in Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and three children when Sudan’s civil war broke out, but as huge numbers of refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants there worsened.
They decided to move to Libya, but “living hell” awaited them there, says Salma.
She describes how, as soon as they crossed the border, they were placed in a warehouse run by human traffickers. The men wanted money that had been paid in advance to traffickers on the Egyptian side of the border, but it never arrived.
Her family spent almost two months in the warehouse. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and taken to a room for women and children. Here she says that she and her two oldest children were exposed to various forms of brutality because they wanted money.
“Their whips left marks on our bodies. They would beat my daughter and put my son’s hands in a burning stove while I watched.
“Sometimes I wished we’d all die together. I couldn’t think of any other way out.”
Salma says her son and daughter were traumatized by the experience and have suffered from incontinence ever since. Then he lowers his voice.
“They would take me to a separate room, the ‘rape room’ with every other man,” she says. “I’m carrying the child of one of them.”
Eventually she raised some money through a friend in Egypt and the traders let the family go.
She says the doctor then told her it was too late for an abortion, and when her husband found out she was pregnant, he abandoned her and the children, leaving them to sleep carefree, eat leftovers from garbage cans and beg on the street.
They found refuge on a remote farm in northwestern Libya for a time, spending whole days with little or no food. They quenched their thirst by drinking infected water from a nearby well.
“My heart breaks when I hear mine [older] son saying he is literally starving,” Salma says over the phone, as her baby’s cries grow louder in the background.
“He is so hungry,” she says, “but I have nothing, not even enough milk in my breasts to feed him.”
Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her mid-40s, also believed reports within the Sudanese community that a better life awaited them in Libya.
She fled previous unrest in Sudan’s western Darfur region in 2014 and spent years in Egypt before moving to Libya in late 2023. She says her daughters have been repeatedly raped since then – they were 19 and 20 the first time. happened.
“I sent them on a cleaning job when I was sick; they came back at night covered in dirt and blood – four men raped them until one of them passed out,” she told the BBC.
Jamila says she was also raped and held captive for weeks by a man, much younger than her, who offered her a job cleaning his house.
“He called me a ‘disgusting black woman.’ He raped me and said, ‘This is what women are made for,'” she recalls.
“Even the children here are mean to us, they treat us like beasts and sorcerers, they insult us for being black and African, aren’t they themselves Africans?” Jamila says.
When her daughters were raped the first time, Jamila took them to the hospital and reported them to the police. But when the officer realized they were refugees, Jamila says he withdrew the report and warned her that she would be closed if the report was officially filed. That was in the west of Libya.
Libya is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees – and considers refugees and asylum seekers “illegal migrants”.
The country is divided into two parts, each governed by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east because they can file official complaints without detention and access health care more easily, according to human rights group Libya Crimes Watch.
While sexual violence is common in unofficial facilities run by traffickers, there is also evidence that abuse occurs in official detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.
Hanaa, a Sudanese woman who works collecting plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, says she was abducted in western Libya and taken to a forest where she was raped at gunpoint by a group of men.
The next day, her attackers took her to a facility run by the State Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hana why she was detained.
Young men and boys were beaten and forced to take off their clothes completely while I watched, Hanaa told the BBC.
“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor, resting my head on plastic slippers. They would let me go to the toilet after hours of begging. They beat me on the head several times.”
There have been numerous earlier reports of abuse of migrants from other African countries in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to had plans to travel there.
In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSA of “unlawful killings, arbitrary detentions, interception and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, forced labor and other shocking violations of human rights and crimes under international law”.
The report said Interior Ministry officials in the capital Tripoli told Amnesty that the ministry had no oversight of the SSA as it reports to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.
Libya Crimes Watch told the BBC that systematic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official migrant detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) stated that there were “increasing reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic stripping and body searches and rape” in Abu Salim.
The Interior Minister and the Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.
Salma has now left the farm and moved into a new room with another family nearby, but she and her family still face the threat of eviction and abuse.
She says she can’t go back home because of what happened to her.
“I’m embarrassing the family, they would say. I’m not sure they would even welcome my dead body,” she says. – If only I knew what was waiting for me here.
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