http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/migrant-women-more-likely-to-be-raped-than-not/It's well known that many people would do pretty almost anything to enter the United States. Sadly, according to a recent Amnesty International report, if you are a migrant woman from Central America, that means more likely than not you will be raped crossing through Mexico.
From McClatchy News:
As many as six out of every 10 Central American women and girls are raped as they pass through Mexico hoping to cross illegally into the United States, Amnesty International said Wednesday.The rapists include criminal gang members as well as local authorities in collusion with them, said Rupert Knox, an Amnesty International researcher on Mexico.
...
The London-based human rights group issued a 48-page report titled "Invisible Victims" that says that tens of thousands of migrants, nearly all of them from Central America, fall prey to gangs that rob, kidnap or rape them as they cross Mexico.
Much of the abuse occurs in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, where criminals who are in cahoots with conductors and local, state or federal police halt freight trains, which often are carrying hundreds of illegal migrants, it said. Problems are also severe in Tabasco and Veracruz states.
Many migrants who pass through those states, Knox said, "suffer abductions, sexual abuse, mistreatment, extortion, murder and other abuses that they endure in this voyage of terror."
Last year, Mexican immigration authorities detained 64,061 migrants, about a fifth of them women or girls, the report says.
Migrants fear that if they report assaults, abductions or rapes, they'll be deported to their home countries, it said.
Having combined complaints, individual interviews and independent monitoring, Amnesty International was able to extrapolate that approximately 60 percent of the women and girls passing through Mexico were sexually assaulted, with of course only a small number of those cases ever being reported to any sort of authorities.
The Amnesty International report claims that the likelihood of rape is so prevalent, some migrant smugglers are demanding women be given a contraceptive shot before the journey to ensure they do not get pregnant along the way.
Then, should a women still get pregnant despite precautions, if she somehow made it into the country and to a state like Nebraska, she would find that we would rather have her and her child be denied medical care and possibly die than give her any sort of aid.
It's as if we have truly lost our sense of compassion all together.