A/HRC/22/59 6. Previous reports of the commission have documented boys’ vulnerability to sexual violence in detention. In late 2012, one interviewee, a 14 year old boy, stated that he was threatened with rape while detained by Military Security in Damascus. Girls also reported sexual violence in detention and in the course of operations by Government forces. A 14 year old girl said that she had been detained by a Government affiliated militia in December and sexually assaulted in detention. She was held with another girl her own age, and according to her mother, she has made three attempts on her life since her release. An FSA fighter from rural Damascus said that after an attack on his neighbourhood by a Government affiliated militia, he found his neighbour’s half-naked grand-daughter, aged 17 in her house. Most of the rest of her family had been killed and he believed she had been raped. A defecting Government intelligence operative said that security services sometimes capture the mothers and sisters of wanted males to pressure their male relatives into surrendering themselves to the authorities. In detention, these women and girls faced forced nudity and rape. 7. There are partially corroborated accounts of young women or girls who committed suicide after being raped. A woman from Homs reported that around May, a young woman aged about 17 or 18 was detained by a Government intelligence agency in Homs. She was released to her father one month later, but before being released, she was forced to serve tea to her father and her captors while naked. When she returned home, she bid goodbye to her mother and then committed suicide by throwing herself from the roof of her home. A defector from Air Force Intelligence and a young woman from Homs confirmed some of the details of this story. A second incident took place in Harak, a town in Dara’a governorate, which was attacked by a large government force between 18 and 25 August. A woman who left Harak after the attack said that one young woman aged between 17 and 20 was among girls and women reportedly raped during the attack, and she later killed herself. In December, Government personnel later visited schools and told schoolgirls “Go home and tell your families that if the FSA shoot any bullets then we will kidnap you.” Girls stopped attending schools as a result. 8. Visiting these horrors on younger women is a means of disorienting a society in which many people build their beliefs about honour and shame around notions of female virginity. This disorientation is clear in (possibly apocryphal) stories of fathers killing their daughters rather than surrendering them to armed attackers; in accounts collected from families that have gone into displacement because of fears for their daughters; accounts of children present during the rape of their mothers; and in accounts of kidnappings and counter kidnappings of young women from the sectarian constituencies of opposing armed groups and militia. C. Unlawful detention of children and ill-treatment of children in detention 9. Detained children have special protections in international law, which requires them to be detained separately from adults and which orients their detention towards rehabilitation. The Syrian Juvenile Justice Act (1974, number 18) allows for punitive detention of children aged 15–17 if they have committed serious offences – but requires that they be detained in special wings of juvenile reformatories. Detained children are being denied these protections today. 10. Many credible informants said that children are routinely detained with adults in the detention facilities of the intelligence services. One 17 year old boy who had spent almost two years in detention estimated that about 50 of 350 prisoners in any given centre were under 18 and that some were as young as eight years. Another interviewee, an adult, described boys “as young as 12” being held in cells with adults in the Military Security 80 GE.13-10627