Horrific!!! 38 Yr old woman tells of how she was bound with barbed wire and tortured with hot irons by Papua New Guinea's 'witch hunters'

• Kathy, 38, from Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea was tortured
• Two days of beatings and burnings killed her unborn child
• Mother-of-six now lives in fear of her attackers who are still at large
• 99 per cent of Mount Hagen women have suffered violence of some sort
• According to locals, women there are worth less than pigs

With just two months to go before the birth of her seventh child, Kathy, 38, from Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, was looking forward to welcoming her new baby into the world.
But tragically, the moment would never arrive. Instead, after a harrowing two day ordeal which saw her repeatedly beaten and raped with an iron bar, Kathy's baby was dead.
Why? Because her family and neighbours believed - wrongly - that she was a witch.

 

Endemic: A woman suspected of being a witch is burned alive after being gang raped in Mount Hagen

Kathy's Mount Hagen homeland is the capital of Papua New Guinea's Eastern Highlands, a place notorious for tribal violence, a ruthlessly applied system of 'payback' and dangerously high levels of drink and drugs.

 

It is also one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, with a shocking 99 per cent of women thought to have suffered violence of some sort at some point in their lives.
Women are, according to locals, worth less than pigs, while many more fall victim to the same sort of superstitious belief as Kathy.
In Mount Hagen, women suspected of being witches can be stoned, burned alive or even burned at the stake.
Kathy was at a family funeral when the phone call that would change her life forever was patched through.

 

Upsetting: Kathy's story is all too common in Papua New Guinea where violence against women is endemic

 

Prisoners: Ross Kemp talks to some of the men incarcerated in Port Moresby. Many of the men are rapists

'There was a phone call and the person on the phone said: "This dead person, whose funeral you've just had, she's the one who ate his heart",' she remembers.
'That's why they took me and tied my hands up with barbed wire.' At the time, she was seven months pregnant but even that wasn't enough to save her from what followed.
'I was strapped up with barbed wire,' she recalls. 'Then they dragged me to the house and locked me inside.
'They took my blouse, put a bush knife through my blouse, my skirt and my tights, took them off and threw them aside. One of them pulled my leg, one of them pulled the other and one man pushed my head back, and I stayed like that. I didn't do anything and I didn't move.'
Already bleeding from the cruel barbed wire and in terror for her life, Kathy hoped that by doing nothing, the men might be persuaded to leave her alone.
But worse was to come. 'One of them split some firewood and made a fire outside,' she says. 'They heated up iron rods, spades and bush knives and when they were really hot, they came in and put them on my skin.
'They damaged all my skin. They pushed an iron into my vagina. They tortured me for two days,' she continues.
'Five times they pushed the rod into my vagina. The things they did to me... They destroyed me. My vagina is still very sore. They shoved iron rods inside me. It's totally destroyed my rectum and my vagina.'
And Kathy's story is by no means unique, as Ross Kemp, points out in the newest series of Extreme World.
Papua New Guinea is home to endemic violence, fuelled by the tribal 'payback' system and made worse by illegal moonshine, drugs and poverty.
It's capital, Port Moresby, was recently declared one of the worst cities to live in on the planet by the Economist Intelligence Unit, with only Syria's war-torn capital Damascus and Bangladeshi capital Dhaka deemed worse.
One of the woman to brave the city is Esther Igo of Women Arise Papua New Guinea, who in an interview with Kemp, declared that violence has gone 'beyond epidemic levels.'
'Every day there is a death, there is a rape, there is a killing, there is a murder, there is some sort of violence,' she explained.
'It's like the whole system, the social structure is breaking down. It's broken. It's all broken.'

 

History: Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in the 1970s and is part of the Commonwealth

 

Tribes: The country has more than hundreds of different groups while 800 different languages are spoken

For many, Kathy among them, the damage is already beyond repair. Her baby, just months from being born, was killed during the brutal attack while Kathy herself is scarred for life and lives in fear of the men who beat her.
'I was crying and I couldn't stop,' she says of the experience. 'The pain was so severe, my baby died and I wanted to die.
'I said: "Don't damage me anymore" but they wouldn't listen. So I asked them to cut my head off so I could go to Heaven and not feel the pain anymore.'

#Ross Kemp's documentary: Extreme World, tonight at 9pm on Sky One

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