Girls in war: Sex slave, mother, domestic aide, combatant

“The attackers tied me up and raped me because I was fighting. About five of them did the same thing to me until one of the commanders who knew my father came and stopped them, but also took me to his house to make me his wife. I just accepted him because of fear and didn’t want to say no because he might do the same thing to me too.” This is the testimony of a young girl of 14 from Liberia as told to the Machel Review in a focus group conducted jointly by the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef) and the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (osrsg/caac).