The captives amount to war booty, used for sexual pleasure and domestic chores like cooking and washing, experts say. The women usually are disposed of with a bullet or a knife once they have served their purpose, become pregnant or otherwise too burdensome. Those lucky enough to escape, often during attacks by security forces, return to a new hell in a culture that prizes sexual purity.
AP news article, May, 1999: "Ex-kidnapped women in Algeria live with stigma, shame"
"These are invisible things. The girl hides it. The family hides it. The state hides it."
Cherifa Bouada
How the moon shone
each of eighteen nights
on petals of dog violet and myrtle
in bloom beyond her tent.
She did not stir when the first man receded from her
(Here are Fetiha's clothes for you to wear
We slit her throat last week)
but spat nightly into tired hands, scouring
until crimson welts rolled from her hot skin
as islands torn from the ocean of her body.
In dreams, she watched a man
lift from her skin like smoke.
The earth beneath him opened
and he fell, seething, through a fissure,
the red ground closing around him.
Each night, the moon flashed briefly
beyond the parted entrance to her tent
and the woman closed her eyes, willing
flames to rise from her thighs,
to engulf her lower half in man-eating fire.
But the men rose, all of them did.
And because she had prayed so violently
she was surprised when they pulled away effortlessly.
Surely his flesh must have melted.
Surely she must have some power.
The night she escaped, she slipped
through the tent, blackness of night
reduced by the glimmer of rifle blasts.
She thought her blood looked the color
of burned berries by the time she reached her village,
where everyone would turn their heads
and call her by another name.