3 of 16 Stories during 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence

The name Patience is not the real name of the survivor; it has been changed to protect her identity. Send your story of Survival to youthziminfo@gmail.com and help raise awareness as a way of fighting Gender Based Violence. 

Patience, aged 17, was trafficked from Masvingo, Zimbabwe to Zambia. In July 2010 Patience’s uncle (husband to her mother’s sister), approached her and suggested that she accompany him to Zambia for a holiday. The idea was for Patience to see if she would like to stay in Zambia permanently with her extended family, as her immediate family was struggling in Zimbabwe. Patience agreed to accompany her uncle to Zambia without the consent of her parents. She abandoned her studies and left for Zambia with her uncle. They boarded on a bus to the border and approximately five kilometres before the border, they disembarked and continued on foot, entering to Zambia through an illegal border crossing point. Once in Zambia, they made their way to the nearest town where they boarded another bus to Lusaka.

Patience does not remember exactly when they arrived in Lusaka, but thinks it may have been on the 14th of July 2010. Upon arrival at the place where they were going to stay, Patience realized that something was wrong. She had been told that she would have her own apartment and they would stay in a building owned by one of her uncle’s friends; instead her uncle rented a room near the bus stop. When Patience asked where she would sleep, her uncle responded that she was now his wife and she would sleep with him. Patience refused and told him that he was married to her aunt and thus it was not acceptable. Her uncle became very abusive an assaulted her both physically and sexually. These assaults continued over a period of two months throughout which Patience was locked in a room. Patience was gravely injured and had one of her ribs broken. At the beginning of September, her uncle left her after realizing that she was pregnant. Patience never saw him again since. After he left, she managed to get away from the building (she was scared as the people there were very abusive) and went to the Zambian police. The police contacted IOM offices in Lusaka and Harare and Patience was put in a temporary shelter where she receives assistance. Currently IOM is facilitating the processing of her emergency travel documents for her to be repatriated back to Zimbabwe.