Sexual Torture Practiced at Masanjia

A linocut by a Falun Gong practitioner depicting a scene at Masanjia in October 2000, where 18 female Falun Gong adherents were stripped naked and forced into a cell with male criminals. (Falun Dafa Information Center)

In a 2001 report the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women said, “In October 2000 prison guards in the Masanjia prison in Shenyang, Liaoning province, allegedly stripped 18 female Falun Dafa [also known as Falun Gong] practitioners and put them into cells containing male convicted criminals.”

According to Falun Gong sources, those 18 women were brutally gang raped. After the rapes, the Masanjia officials refused to allow anyone to visit the victims, and camp officials sought to cover up the crime.

Sexual abuse has been a constant part of the repertoire of tortures developed at Masanjia to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up their spiritual beliefs.

According to the special rappoteur, “Electric batons are used to shock the breasts and genitals of the female practitioners” at Masanjia Labor Camp. 

According to Falun Gong sources, at Masanjia and other labor camps the electric batons, which have a charge of thousands of volts, are inserted inside the vagina, on or inside the anus, inside the mouth, and on the breasts, as well as all other parts of the body.

In one of the most vicious of these incidents, in early 2003 Wang Yunjie was shocked for hours on both breasts, according to a report on the Falun Gong website Minghui. Pictures show her breasts are open wounds after the torture. 

Expecting Wang to die, the camp discharged her. She did pass away in 2006 as a result of the torture she had received. 

Other means, cruder than electric clubs, are also used.

Li Huiying was a judge in Dalian, a major city on China’s coast, when she was sentenced to labor camp for her belief in Falun Gong, arriving at Masanjia sometime in 2005.

She reports female practitioners there being sexually assaulted with a broken, jagged rod and a broken beer bottle.

Women at Masanjia have been forced to stand naked in the freezing cold. They are often stripped naked for torture, but they are also humiliated by being forced to stand naked before a video camera. 

“Sexual abuse generates not only physical pain, but also shame and fear that can last forever,” said Dr. Jingduan Yang, a psychiatrist in Philadelphia. “It is the most damaging trauma to people’s mental health and self esteem.”

He says the goal of the sexual abuse in the labor camps is to break down the individual’s belief system.

In his medical practice, he has seen the damage that is done.

“One patient was scared of people standing behind her, because she was kidnapped from behind,” Dr. Yang said. “Any time she hears a high-pitched sound, she hears fellow Falun Gong practitioners screaming in pain.”

Such victims may suffer from “severe neurological and muscular skeletal pain and cramps, severe anxiety, depression, insomnia, avoidance, nightmares, panic attacks, and flashbacks,” said Dr. Yang. 

In 2005, the human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng undertook his own investigation of the persecution of Falun Gong and discovered practitioners were routinely subjected to sexual torture.

In an open letter to the Communist Party’s top leaders he wrote, “Almost every woman’s genitals and breasts or every man’s genitals have been sexually assaulted during the persecution in a most vulgar fashion. ... No language or words could describe or re-create our government’s vulgarity and immorality in this respect. Who with a warm body could afford to stay silent when faced with such truths?” 

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