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enough that a parent should have to cope with a child being tortured and<br />
raped, or have to sell remaining family assets and means of livelihood or<br />
borrow money in order to ransom their child out of detention and send them<br />
abroad. It further compounds the trauma that they can no longer talk on the<br />
phone safely to their children alone in a foreign country to provide loving<br />
support. Worse still is when those remaining in Sri Lanka have themselves to<br />
live in fear, go into hiding or face physical violence fearing for their lives. This is<br />
a form of further and on-going persecution.<br />
For the torture survivor abroad, the threat to their families back home makes it<br />
much more difficult to recover from their ordeal. Guilt that they are responsible<br />
for causing unending suffering to those they love often appears to be the<br />
trigger for suicide attempts once survivors have reached safety.<br />
In one of the most shocking cases we have documented, the witness’s father,<br />
suspected of being an LTTE supporter, was beaten to death after she had<br />
already been detained and raped, and then her remaining relatives were killed<br />
and she was detained and raped yet again:<br />
“My mother telephoned me and told me that the authorities had said to her if<br />
she did not tell them where I was hiding she and my brother would be killed.<br />
She told me that I did not need to worry and that she would never tell them<br />
where I was. She assured me that somehow we would be able to look after<br />
ourselves. The next day, I was contacted by my mother’s sister, my aunt, who<br />
told me that my family’s home had been set on fire and my mother and brother<br />
died in the fire.”<br />
(Witness 38)<br />
In another case, a torture survivor said his father was beaten by the security<br />
forces days after he had given an interview to the media about the civil war for<br />
the anniversary in May 2015. His father, who was otherwise healthy, died a few<br />
days later; a death certificate and medical records were supplied. The witness<br />
had tried to kill himself on learning the news. He said he had no idea that the<br />
consequences of his actions could be so drastic for his family:<br />
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