A/HRC/43/CRP.6 by intelligence forces in Homs. Later, the boy was raped by security agents while others watched. 63. Survivors were seldom provided with immediate care after the assault had taken place, and were rarely able to seek treatment and psychological support upon release due to the stigma and social pressure attached to violations of a sexual nature. The Commission received numerous accounts of survivors becoming suicidal, suffering guilt and shame, as well as developing reproductive health problems. 64. The threat of rape and other forms of sexual violence was used to spread fear amongst young girls and their families. In late 2012 for example, when Government forces took over Harak village, Dar’a governorate, graffiti stating “your men in our prisons, your women in our laps” began to appear. A few months later, Government forces went to a school in Harak. When inside the school they told female pupils to warn FSA fighters that if the group started shooting the girls would be kidnapped. Parents subsequently removed the girls from school. Rape and the threat of rape was also cited as a reason for families to send their daughters abroad to displacement camps, or for families to flee in Aleppo, Dar’a, Hama and Homs governorates. 65. Children were also harassed, insulted and subjected to intimate searches at checkpoints in Damascus, Dar’a and Homs. At an Air Force Intelligence checkpoint in Dar’a in November 2013, security services asked a young girl, who was travelling with her mother, whether she was already married and threatened to perform a virginity test on her. In a separate incident in Homs, 10 boys aged between 14 and 17 were taken out of a bus at a Political Security Branch staffed checkpoint and forced to strip naked. Non-state armed groups and terrorist organizations 66. Instances of rape and sexual violence perpetrated by armed groups have also been recorded. Women and girls were subjected to sexual and gender-based violations most often with elements of revenge, sectarianism or exploitation. The Commission recorded numerous cases of families forced to allow the marriage of their minor daughters with members of armed groups in rif Damascus. Such alliances often resulted in the girl being abandoned shortly thereafter, and later prevented from returning to her family home as she had been “dishonoured.” 67. Harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage, have been documented in areas close to Damascus, including in Yarmouk camp by Jabhat al-Nusra and in areas controlled by ISIL. Some of these marriages were imposed on girls as young as 14. Moreover, thousands of Yazidi girls, some as young as nine, were sold in slave markets in Raqqah, Aleppo, Homs, Hasakah and Dayr al-Zawr Governorates. While in captivity, Yazidi girls endured brutal rapes and physical violence, were denied access to adequate food and medicine, and severely punished by severe beatings and gang rapes when they attempted to escape. IV. Impact of the conflict on children “They have erased the dreams of my children. They have destroyed what we have built during our whole life; my daughter was so depressed when she found out that our house was burnt down. My other child, a three-year-old boy, is traumatized by the crisis. He is continuously drawing tanks” Interviewee discussing attacks on her village in Idlib, March 2012 68. Eight years into the conflict, children are adapting to a grim reality where the restriction of their basic rights, including health, education and documentation, has become routine. The unprecedented and recurrent nature of the myriad violations endured by each girl and boy, as a victim or a witness to the violence of the Syrian war, have affected young people in a plethora of ways. 16