Police receive at least four rape reports every day in Sri Lanka, with minors making up the majority of victims, according to the Children and Women Bureau. Perpetrators are usually related or known to victims.
But the number of incidents is likely much higher. R.M.A Nimalsiri, a senior counselor in the Ministry of Child Development and Women’s Affairs, says that data on how many teenage girls are raped annually is incomplete, as families settle most cases among themselves because of social and cultural taboos.
Neetha Ariyaratne, general secretary of Sarvodaya Suwasetha Sewa Society, says the center is taking in pregnant rape victims who are younger than ever.
“We rarely got girls who were raped at the age of 12 and 13,” Ariyaratne says. “But now, more girls are in that age group, and we face difficulties in telling them what has happened to them. How can we say [to] these small children that they carry babies?”
Sanduni, a 12-year-old girl wearing a pink floral frock, runs and jumps with her 13- and 14-year-old friends at Ma Sevana. They are each several months pregnant. Their bellies become bigger every day, even though many say they don’t understand why.
Sanduni’s family lived on the street in the central bus stand in Anuradhapura, one of the holy cities in Sri Lanka’s North Central province. She doesn’t know how to read and write, as she never attended school.
Her stepfather sexually abused her every night since she was 8 years old. She says she thought such abuse was normal.
Now, Sanduni says she knows the abuse was wrong but struggles to process it. She says she loves her stepfather because he gave her a doll and touched her body gently. But in the next moment, she says she wants to chop him into pieces because she is boiling with anger.
She also doesn’t yet understand how she got a baby inside her belly.
Wasantha Pinnawela, the matron at Ma Sevana, says sexual abuse happened so often to some girls that they don’t understand that’s how they became pregnant.
“I am speechless when these small girls ask how they got babies inside their bellies,” she says. “Since they are repeatedly sexually abused from their very tender ages, they don’t know what action made them pregnant.”
Ma Sevana is the only center in Sri Lanka for underage pregnant mothers who are the victims of rape, according to the Department of Probation and Child Care Services. But there is another home registering with the department to provide services for teenage mothers and any women who are pregnant out of wedlock.
When the Magistrate’s Court reviews underage rape cases, they now send the girls to Ma Sevana for six months to one year until they deliver their babies and the courts reach a verdict for the accused.
But this is a new judicial trend. Ariyaratne says the common practice has been to send pregnant teenage rape victims to prisons in order to protect them from their
