Yousef, a 28-year-old gay man, was raped by Syrian intelligence agents who had detained him for participating in protests during the conflict in Syria.
He fled to Lebanon, but found only limited services to help him deal with the traumatic aftermath. By the time I interviewed him, he was resettled in the Netherlands.
Geographically speaking, he was away from all the violence, but it still haunted him. “I look behind me when I am walking,” he told me. “I still wake up at night.
It [the trauma] is not over.”Yousef is one of dozens of sexual violence survivors from Syria whom I interviewed for Human Rights Watch.