Horror! How Children Are Having Babies Fathered by Their Relatives In Guatemala

In Guatemala, it is common to see children as young as ten cradling babies who could easily pass for their younger brothers or sisters, reports Mail UK. These children were either raped by their male cousins, their uncles or fathers. Some however, were sold by their mothers to much older ‘husbands’ for as little as a bed.

A Swedish photographer, Linda Forsell, took an interest in the country where children are having children against their will and in the course of repeated trips during a two year period; she got some of the little girls to tell her their stories:

– A 13-year-old girl was tied to a tree while a 53-year-old man raped her.
– A girl was sold to her 22-year-old husband when she was 12.
– Another girl was just so young she didn’t know she could get pregnant when a 28-year-old man began bringing her gifts.

It is reported that in 2014, there were 5,100 babies born to teen mothers under the age of 14. Meanwhile, there had been 4,354 babies born to less than 14-year-old girls previously in year 2013.

According to Mirna Montenegro, the head of Guatemala’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Observatory (OSAR), the problem stems from men’s belief that a woman is their ‘property and possession’.

“We’ve heard fathers say ‘She’s my daughter and my property so I will do what I want with her’,” revealed Montenegro.

The use of rape is a legacy of Guatemala’s civil war, which ran for 36 years until the mid-1990s, says Montenegro. It is thought that about 100,000 women were raped during those violent years, with both the American CIA-backed right wing generals and left wing insurgents using rape as a weapon.
Thousands of women of all ages are still raped every year in Guatemala. Although about 10,000 women are courageous enough to report rape, it is sad that just 1 in 10 of them will  see her attacker convicted.

Carolina Escobar, director of La Alianza Guatemala, which runs shelters in the country reports that,

“Guatemala has a culture, highly tolerant to sexual violence against girls and women, which normalizes – and even justifies in several cases – this type of violence.”

Escobar says the culture of rape is considered a taboo and is not discussed in society. It is sad that even the church in Guatemala has been indicted for creating barriers for authorities dealing with teen pregnancies. Forsell disputes the given numbers saying it is, ‘not even the tip of the iceberg’.

In some ways, the numbers are the less shocking aspect of this epidemic, which puts both the mothers and their children in mortal danger. Nearly all teenage births, 90 per cent, involve a relative, an uncle or cousin and a horrifying 30 per cent of children are born as a result of the girls’ own father raping her.

The trauma of what has happened to these girls, many too young to understand what was happening to them and some, who had never heard of contraception, can be seen on the faces of the mothers in some of Forsell’s photographs below:

The government is attempting to crack down on the epidemic, however: this week a new law was passed, increasing the legal age for marriage to 18. Previously, it had been just 14.