Jackie Jones, Jeanne Sarson, and Linda MacDonald
41
African and Asian women
UK immigrants
Women known by
Canadian authors
Watched others or heard
cries of others being tortured,
including family members
Rapes photographed; tortured
and raped in front of others,
family members, including
children, or in public
Rapes photographed; watched
others being tortured, forced
to participate in sexualized
torture victimization of
others including children;
repetitively trafficked to
like-minded group for sex
ualized torture “parties”;
pornographic images made as
‘teaching tool’, forced to harm
or kill animals
Impregnations, abortions,
miscarriages from violent
beatings and rapes
Impregnations, abortions, lost
pregnancies due to violent
rapes
Impregnations, violent abor
tions perpetrated; forced to
consume aborted tissue
Locations where tortured: in
their house, during arrest and
detention, in a warehouse,
a Navy base, and police
installations
Location where tortured: at
home, in detention, in police
custody, in the bush, in a
graveyard
Location where tortured: at
home, homes of like-minded,
warehouse, farm, woods, cab
ins, basements, boats, plane,
military base, church, motel,
fire station, professional’s
office, modelling agency
Mexican women
Although all of the women in the above chart may not have suffered every act of torture
described, they did suffer acts of torture that caused severe pain and suffering—physical, sexu
alized, and mental. Besides intent and purpose being gendered, other forms of multi-intersect
ing discriminatory vulnerabilities were noted. The Mexican women were mostly young and of
low income; many were single parents, and others were considered to be gender non-conform
ing. Vulnerabilities existed for the Asian and African women who reported being raped when as
young as six years old, through to the age of sixty-two. Moreover, the women were tortured on a
mass scale, over a broad geographical area. The Asia and African women were mainly single, and
some were traumatised by their loss of children who died from violence, starvation, and disease.
For the majority of the women known to the Canadian authors, they suffered non-State torture
victimization from birth or shortly thereafter that lasted for years. Many were in their early adult
years before finding ways to escape, surviving over 23,000 rapes, for instance, in addition to being
trafficked, prostituted, and exploited by the pornography industry (Sarson & MacDonald, 2016a).
These kinds of repetitive rapes are considered torture (Fortin, 2008).
Amnesty’s research on the Mexican women lasted eight months. The women from Asia and
Africa sought services from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture for six
months. For the women known to the Canadian authors, contacts ranged from single disclosing
testimonies to decades, which explains why the accounts of torture victimization are more detailed,
due to the period of time some women had to disclose. Disclosures can arise spontaneously, years
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