A probe has been opened in Chad after a video was distributed on social media of a woman being whipped by two men who appear to be soldiers, the country’s justice minister said Wednesday.
“The perpetrators of these acts have been apprehended and will be brought before justice without delay to answer for their actions,” minister Djimet Arabi told AFP.
The video, shot in the vicinity of Lake Chad, shows a women on the ground being whipped by two men in military garb.
The women told a local human rights organisation that one of the men was an army major whose advances she had rebuffed.
AFP could not reach the two men implicated.
“The act is so despicable that we have decided to help the victim in her bid for justice,” said Mahamat Nour Ahmed Ibedou, secretary general of the CTDDH human rights defenders group.
Many cases of violence against women in Chad “go unnoticed,” he added.
In Chad, 78 percent of women are illiterate, compared to 50 percent of men, and more than two-thirds marry before the age of 18, often entering into coercive — and illegal — unions.
