Ceuta has established an impromptu “shelter in a soccer field” for women and girls hiding from the thousands of majority-Muslim, male migrants who have refused to leave the city since last week’s invasion, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo revealed on Thursday.
Other reports detail growing numbers of women and girls, many of whom entered the city with the wave of thousands of invading foreigners crossing into the Spanish territory on July 30 and overwhelming local authorities, coming forward to hospitals and social authorities seeking help after reportedly being raped. The prevalence of rape and abuse by male migrants against the much smaller number of female migrants has grown to such an extent that local police have divided the thousands of child migrants hovering outside the main local police station in Ceuta by sex and are prioritizing processing the girls to get them away from the boys.
A flood of foreign nationals estimated between 49,000 to 60,000 people suddenly swarmed the small Spanish city of Ceuta on the African continent on July 30, swimming out of Morocco and landing on the beaches of the city. Ceuta is typically home to a population of about 84,000 people and was completely unprepared from a security standpoint for the invasion, resulting in little Spanish authority resistance to the arrival of the mostly male, largely northern African migrant wave. The migrants invaded the city in response to a Spanish Supreme Court order in late June that ruled authorities could not immediately return an illegal immigrant to his home country if he entered Spain by sea.
The Spanish government has since claimed to remove most of those illegally in Ceuta, recently claiming that only about 2,000 “irregular” migrants remain in the city. Local residents and authorities alike strongly dispute this figure, asserting that at least 6,000 migrants are still roaming the streets, setting up makeshift “mosques” on the beach, and taking possession of the woods outside the city center.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo describes Ceuta as “torn in three”: the city center, which has largely returned to normal; the beach, where “hundreds of people sleep around bonfires and pray around a mosque drawn with rocks on the sand”; and the besieged city outskirts where much of the reported violence and sexual assault is believed to occur.
The few women and girls who arrived to Ceuta with the migrant wave have suffered tremendous amounts of abuse, sexual and otherwise, the newspaper reported. To protect them, authorities have outfitted a makeshift soccer field for 150 of them seeking “to protect themselves from sexist and sexual violence.” Others have chosen to seek the aid of local Moroccan women, who have offered them shelter. One mother-daughter pair, staying at the home of a Ceuta local, said they had been offered some shelter by a random man who later tried to “abuse” the daughter and beat them both when they refused to accept the abuse.
The newspaper also detailed instances of public violence in which locals have had to stop mobs of men from raping girls in the street. “I ran out of the house and started to yell at those sons of whores,” a woman identified as “neighborhood grandmother” Rajaa told El Mundo. “There were five adult men, between 30 and 35 years old, known in the neighborhood” trying to rape a girl.
Rajaa said she offered the girl shelter after the incident, stopped a police car “but they didn’t even pay attention to us,” and found the girl’s mother in Morocco, a prostitute who said she didn’t want her back.
“It’s all horrible and inhuman,” the woman lamented.
Earlier in the week, the Spanish outlet OK Diario reported, citing anonymous sources in the local Ceuta government, that authorities were aware of at least ten case of Moroccan migrant girls being raped since July 30 when the invasion occurred. The authorities described the girls as being aged 14 and older, having appeared among some other women in Ceuta’s hospitals requesting medical aid after what appeared to be rape. An anonymous official said that forensics experts later confirmed “genital lesions” consistent with rape on the victims. OK Diario‘s sources lamented that the number of similar cases is growing as the situation “worsens” on the streets of Ceuta.
To address the situation, police in Ceuta reportedly dispersed the crowd of hundreds of alleged “youths” outside of the main police station in the city who were standing around hoping to be processed legally. They did this after dividing the crowd into groups of girls and boys and prioritizing processing the girls and getting them away from the male migrants. The Spanish newspaper ABC reported that the police decided to no longer allow the “youths” to stay outside the station after multiple instances in which they had crossed over barriers placed around the station and caused brawls among themselves, which had caused enough damage to require a Red Cross response.
ABC added that forcing them to leave, given their status as alleged minors, was a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Reports suggest that police will not be able to address the swarms of male alleged youths until at least Monday. An agreement on migrants between Spain and Morocco would require the latter country to take back the children, and the Moroccan government has expressed a willingness to do so, but the Spanish government has not acted on enforcing this.
At the national level the government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is no longer addressing the situation in any significant way as the cabinet of ministers is on vacation for most of the rest of the month.