Well, yes. The way I would frame it is that, certainly, when you have a situation in which you have a military almost entirely of one ethnicity in a context where there is virtually complete impunity for crimes committed by government forces, and has been for many years, and when you have it effectively controlling a population of another ethnicity, many of whom are living in female-headed households due to the deaths of husbands or fathers, you certainly have a situation where it would be surprising if there weren't a lot of either direct sexual violence or coercive sexual relationships of some sort or another, where women who are poor and don't have significant economic opportunities or options basically trade sex for food or for money. It would certainly be surprising if that didn't happen.
But we need to be careful. Until we're able to get the real stories and begin to put together a real dossier of cases, I wouldn't want to make a claim stronger than I am able to on the evidence. Certainly all the conditions are there and the anecdotal evidence is significant that there is a very serious problem of sexual violence and, of course, of sexual relationships and growing prostitution, often with effectively the de facto support of the military and the police. So there are a lot of reasons to believe there's a real problem.
But impunity and intimidation against witnesses are such that it's very risky for women to speak out. There is one case that has proceeded to court of a woman who was raped a few years ago in the north. She repeatedly goes to court, I've been told by lawyers who've appeared with her. She is questioned in intimidating ways, her lawyers say. One of the main suspects is absconding. In that context, how many women would like to take their cases to the police or to the courts, if the few brave ones who do are treated in this way? It's a very hard situation to really get strong evidence on, if people are so afraid of speaking up.