Hanaa, a Sudanese woman who works gathering plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, says she was abducted in western Libya and taken to a forest and raped at gunpoint by a group of men.
The next day her attackers took her to a facility run by the state-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). Nobody told Hanaa why she had been detained.
“Young men and boys were beaten and forced to completely remove their clothes while I was watching,” Hanaa tells the BBC.
“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor, resting my head on my plastic slippers. They would let me go to the toilet after hours of begging. I was repeatedly beaten on the head.”
There have been numerous previous reports of migrants from other African countries being abused in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to planned to travel there.
In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSA of “unlawful killings, arbitrary detentions, interception and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, forced labour, and other shocking human rights violations and crimes under international law”.
The report states that Ministry of Interior officials in the capital, Tripoli, told Amnesty that the ministry had no oversight over the SSA since it answers to the prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.
Libya Crimes Watch has told the BBC that systemic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official migrant detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there was an “increasing number of reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic strip and intimate body searches and rape” at Abu Salim.
The interior affairs minister and the Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.
Salma has now left the farm moved into a new room with another family nearby, but she and her family still face the threat of eviction and abuse.
She says she cannot go back home because of what happened to her.
“I bring shame on the family, they would say. I’m not sure they would even welcome my dead body,” she says. “If only I had known what was awaiting me here.”