Army’s rape of Rohingya women was ‘sweeping and methodical’

The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar’s security forces has been “sweeping” and “methodical,” according to a report by the Associated Press.

The news agency says a “sickening sameness” has emerged in 29 interviews with women and girls, ranging in age from 13 to 35, who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar.

Each woman said she was raped by a group of men.

Every woman, except one, said her rapists wore military-style uniforms. The one woman who said her assailants wore plain clothes also said that her neighbors recognised the men as being stationed at the local military outpost.

Many of the women said their assailants’ uniforms had either star or arrows on them. AP says the patches “represent the different units of Myanmar’s army.”

The women’s assaults took place between October 2016 and mid-September in “a wide swathe of villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state,” the news agency says.

AP says doctors and aid workers are “stunned” at the volume of rapes, but “suspect only a fraction of women have come forward.”

Doctors informed the AP that they have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, with a third of them under 18 and the youngest was nine.