By Thomson Reuters Foundation
Khady knew the man who waited outside her house one evening, followed her down a dark street and put his hand over her mouth. She had refused his offer of marriage several months before.
The assault that followed is a blur. The 26-year-old fell pregnant, and five months later she was jailed for breaking Mauritania’s law banning sex outside of marriage.
“They said I was guilty. I don’t know why,” she said at a center for victims of rape in the capital, Nouakchott.
“I thought if I told the police what happened, they would put him in prison,” Khady, whose name has been changed for her protection, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Sex outside wedlock is by far the most common cause of incarceration for women in Mauritania, accounting for more than 40 percent of female prisoners, according to a survey by the Mauritanian Association for the Health of the Mother and…
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