Gambia’s Women Break Their Silence

The first stories surfaced when Human Rights Watch Senior Counsel Reed Brody and I started collecting evidence for the “Campaign to Bring Yahya Jammeh and his Accomplices to Justice” (#Jammeh2Justice). That was in October 2017. While I was interviewing people, I was told that there had been many rumors that Jammeh had forced women to have sex with him.

How did you go about probing these rumors?

I found a lot online about how Jammeh, who fled the country a month after being defeated in elections in December 2016 and now lives in Equatorial Guinea, coerced young women by promising scholarships and jobs. There were stories about so-called “protocol girls,” young women hired by the president to work as event hostesses at the Protocol Department. Some media reports even compared the protocol girls to “sexual slaves” who lived at State House, the presidential residence, without being allowed to leave. I had already talked to survivors of rape committed by former high-level officials. But I had not gotten first-hand information about cases that involved the president himself…