Yes. It's a serious question. It's also a difficult question to answer with any great degree of specificity given the heavily militarized nature of the Northern province particularly.
The International Crisis Group released a report a little over two years ago, called “Sri Lanka: Women's Insecurity in the North and East”, which detailed the basic aspects of the situation, the basic contributing factors that made women deeply insecure, both economically and socially, but also insecure against sexual violence. Those same factors, which have a lot to do...I mean the central one is heavy militarization, combined with absolutely no reliable forms of redress, no reliable institutions to which a victim of sexual violence could complain, i.e. not a fair and just police or judiciary, those conditions still continue.
There are increasing reports which have yet to be fully verified, but certainly from the reports that I get from women activists and other organizations working in the north and from others who are interviewing Tamil women who have left Sri Lanka and are now seeking asylum in various countries, it appears that there is a quite severe problem of sexual violence against Tamil women. It's very hard to tell you exact numbers or the trends, but there is a significant body of evidence that suggests it's quite a serious problem.