Abdullal Abu Bakar, who works for the government and runs the camp, winked conspiratorially and laughed, partly from embarrassment. "There was not a single case, I tell you," he said. "That's why we closed the tent.' "
Innocence Lost
Katuma Adam still sees the men in her nightmares. It was late May, the height of the rainy season, when the Janjaweed gunmen attacked her village in North Darfur. One of them grabbed her. His hand slipped under her dress.
"He pushed into me and it was hurting me very much," she recounted recently, after the ritual washing in a shelter built of sticks and rags, inside a camp for victims of violence in Darfur. "I had no strength. I just shut my eyes."
Afterward, she said, she was covered in blood and crying. "I felt very, very thirsty and in shock." She was not yet 15.
There was nowhere Katuma could turn for help -- no counseling services, no legal aid offices, no sympathetic law enforcement agency. Darfur, a region engulfed by human crisis and flooded with refugees, barely has a functioning police force or justice system.
For weeks after the attack, Katuma remained sequestered in her hut, her head pillowed on a pile of rocks. She stayed inside even through the thick afternoon heat, too ashamed to emerge and seek shade under a tree like others in the camp. She said her legs felt like stone and her mind was numb with depression. She worried constantly about her child's future, and her own.
"I will never find love," she said after the cleansing ceremony. "Will this washing help me find a husband?" Katuma and her mother, Aisha Bakhet Adam, consented to be identified by name.
Aisha Adam, 43, a sturdy widow with six children, has no time for melancholy musings. She is on a mission. Every day, she listens to radio reports about the war. She knows that many people have died and many more have been displaced. And she knows that in four months, her daughter will give birth to a child of the Janjaweed.
Aisha Adam has few illusions about the chances of proving the rapist's guilt. What she needs is evidence of her daughter's innocence, a way to convince potential suitors and their families that she did not ask to be raped. A police report or a court case would be ideal, she said, but she had no idea how to approach the government.
After thinking it over, she decided the water ritual might help reduce her daughter's shame and protect her unborn child from becoming a social outcast.
So on a recent day, the mother crawled out of her waist-high hut, doffed an orange head scarf and oversize sunglasses and trudged purposefully along the footpaths of this garbage-strewn camp until she found Adam Abdul Karim, a local sheik, waiting in a food line. She told him she needed his help.
"I don't think the government will ever catch this man, and I don't think my daughter will ever mend her heart unless we do something now," she told him. "I am very ashamed, [but] I am trying to hide my embarrassment and help my daughter. Right now, we are alone with this problem."
Karim consulted a sheaf of ragged notes and suggested he perform the ritual washing. It was a custom normally applied in local African tribes when a woman's husband died or she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. This would be the first time at this camp, Karim said, that it would be used to exonerate a victim of sexual violence.
"She is unclean, touched by her enemy," he said. "This is one option we can try."
