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More than 100,000 women may have been raped during the two-year civil war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, according to the most comprehensive study so far of these attacks in research conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane. And countless women who gave birth as a result are struggling with a hidden agony, often ostracized even by their families. They have been victimized twice, once during the conflict that pitted Ethiopia’s military and allied soldiers from Eritrea against Tigrayan rebels, and a second time by their own communities, even after a cease-fire a year ago quieted the hostilities.

A dozen rape survivors, most raising young children, recounted in interviews their efforts to rebuild shattered lives. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity.

During the war, all sides committed rapes, human rights groups and victims report, but the most sustained and organized violence was committed against Tigrayan women, who said they were raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and by militiamen from Ethiopia’s Amhara region.

A survey of more than 5,000 women of reproductive age in Tigray, reported in July in the medical journal BMJ Global Health, found that nearly 8 percent said they had been raped. Of them, more than two-thirds said they were gang raped, and a quarter said they were raped on multiple occasions. That figure is likely to be an undercount, because of stigma and because some areas where violence was highest — such as in Shila’s hometown — are inaccessible, with Eritrean soldiers still occupying them. (Ethiopia and Eritrea have denied that their soldiers committed widespread rapes.)

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/26/ethiopia-tigray-rape-survivors-stigma/