“Iwas a sex slave kept naked in a hole in the ground and raped nearly every day for six months,” fifteen-year-old Elise told me as we sat under a tree in Minova, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. “The [combatants] dragged me from my home when they attacked my village. They also took my best friend. They tore off our clothes and five of them raped me on the first day. Others raped my friend. Then they took us to their camp and threw us together in a dried-up well. We tried to crawl out to escape, but we couldn’t manage. I was only taken out when they wanted to rape me.”

She spoke with little emotion, but her toes were tightly curled and her hands clenched the ground as if she needed stability. “We were treated like animals,” she said. “They would occasionally throw us scraps of food. My friend decided to resist when they came to rape her. [The combatants] punished her by hitting her repeatedly on the head.

Then they threw her back in the hole with me. She died of her injuries. For days they left me with her corpse.”

She paused for a moment, looked at me as if to make sure I was following her story, and then continued. “One day [government] soldiers attacked the camp and [my captors] ran away. Then there was silence. I screamed and screamed for help but no one came. I thought I too would die in that hole. I had no food and no water for days. But a woman who had also been kept as a sex slave by the combatants, and who had been rescued by the soldiers, told them she was sure there were more victims left behind at the camp. She convinced the soldiers to come back and then they found me.”

She sighed and neither one of us spoke for a moment. Her story was almost too horrifying to take in. Yet her ordeal did not end there. “As I began to recover, I found out I was pregnant,” she added quietly. “I don’t even know who the father is, but I know it was one of those men who raped me.” Her family rejected her when she returned home pregnant.