Five years of sexual violence by Myanmar military since 2021 coup

In a September 2022 article in Frontier Myanmar online magazine, journalist Ye Mon gave a first-hand account of the sexual violence he faced from regime soldiers after being detained upon his return to Yangon on Dec. 12, 2021 after spending time abroad for work following the military coup on Feb. 1, 2021.

“I begged them to stop, but they just told me to be quiet. It went on for about an hour,” Ye Mon recounted in his article. “I was in shock; I never expected the soldiers would behave like that. It occurred to me that if they were sick enough to rape me, they could kill me at any moment.”

Ye Mon is not the only Myanmar journalist to face sexual violence. Hanthar Nyein, the co-founder of Kamayut Media, was arrested alongside American journalist and fellow co-founder Nathan Maung on March 9, 2021.

Hanthar told DVB by email that he was tortured and threatened with sexual violence by Myanmar soldiers during a two-week-long interrogation at Yay Kyi Ai interrogation centre in Yangon’s Mingaladon Township.

“I was subjected to many forms of torture,” Hanthar recalled, “Two people restrained me. One held my face and violently slammed it against the wall while my arms were pinned. They then pulled down my trousers and attempted to rape me. When I was left only in my underwear, I screamed desperately and told them I would tell them everything.”

Nathan Maung was released on June 15, 2021. Hanthar Nyein wasn’t released until nearly four years later, on April 17, 2025.

The National Committee for the Prevention and Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict in Myanmar, which is under the regime’s Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, announced on Feb. 21 that it has a zero-tolerance policy towards sexual violence.

It also claims to protect all Myanmar citizens, including women, children and LGBTQI+ from sexual violence.

This regime claim comes after a Feb. 2 statement called U.N. Special Representative Pramila Patten Calls for Accountability as Sexual Violence Continues Five Years After Myanmar Military Seized Power.

“The scale and brutality of sexual violence perpetrated in Myanmar is horrifying,” stated Pramila Patten, the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

The U.N. is calling on regime leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power in a military coup on Feb. 1, 2021, to “immediately cease and prevent” all forms of sexual violence carried out by his pro-regime forces. It includes calls for resistance forces, opposed to the 2021 coup, to do the same.

The U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar investigated human rights violations, which included sexual violence, committed by the military in Rakhine State in 2019. It revealed that women were raped and men were subjected to genital mutilation, and were forced to perform sexual acts on other men while in military custody.

“It is horrendously difficult for victims of sexual violence to come forward. To hold someone criminally responsible requires testimony in court. And for many, it has tremendous consequences for their psychological well-being and their relationship with other members of their family,” said Nicholas Koumjian, the head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism For Myanmar (IIMM).

The IIMM was founded by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2018 to collect and analyse evidence of the most serious international crimes and other violations of international law committed in Myanmar. It requests information be shared with it via Signal +41 766-911-208.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), which is a human rights watchdog organization monitoring Myanmar from Thailand, has published numerous reports on sexual violence committed by military regimes over the last 26 years calling it “systematic.”