Absolutely, and thank you so much for taking the time to read our report. I would just make a note that those statistics do come from a smaller survey, so it's not necessarily a population-based survey. Those were numbers we found in a smaller clinic-based sample of women who reported experiencing sexual violence. I do think those numbers are reflective of other organizations who do find that roughly one in three women faces actual social isolation or full-on rejection from their own families as a result of experiencing sexual violence. A number of other women actually feel forced to leave their own communities as a result of the negative attitudes toward women who have undergone rape.
As you can imagine, this exposes women to dire cycles of vulnerability without a family structure, with no way to earn money, and who are often taking care of children. These women are forced to live on the streets and create a living on their own. Often, this forces them tragically to turn to transactional sex, or leaves them being passed from hand to hand, from relative to relative, with nowhere to go.
One thing that's interesting and shows the linkages between different aspects of this conflict is that sometimes women who are rejected by their families end up in these artisanal mining towns, because they are the few places that women can go with the hope or promise of economic opportunity. They are places where many women feel like they don't need families to be able to make it. There we very much see this cycle of vulnerability where women who do travel to mining towns often have no other option but to engage in transactional sex work instead of being able to undertake other forms of employment.
One of the things that women told us was that as hard as it may be to understand, the stigma can actually be more traumatic than the rape itself because it has lifelong repercussions. In a highly social society where women are often sadly defined by their relationships with men, being expelled from a family or a community means that they're left with literally no support structures to rely on. It was very poignant to hear women talk about that.
Again, tying things into some of the other issues we've talked about, women really saw education, both for themselves and their children, as a way to lift themselves out of some of these cycles of vulnerability.