New York: The New York Times said in a report that migrant women were victims of sexual assaults on the US-Mexico border that most often go “unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted”.
According to the report on Sunday, undocumented women making their way into American border towns have been beaten for disobeying smugglers, impregnated by strangers, coerced into prostitution, shackled to beds and trees and, in at least a handful of cases, bound with duct tape, rope or handcuffs.
The New York Times found dozens of documented cases through interviews with law enforcement officials, prosecutors, federal judges and immigrant advocates around the country, and a review of police reports and court records in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
The New York Times report said that last July, a 23-year-old Honduran woman told the authorities that she was sexually assaulted in a bedroom closet by a smuggler who had helped her and her sister cross into the South Texas city of Mission. But experts told The New York Times that the actual number of sexual assaults was almost certainly much higher because most attacks are never reported.
