The Tuscan Weekly has a piece up on sexual assault along the Mexican border.

According to experts, rape is now considered “the price of admission” for women crossing the border illegally.

But this scourge goes largely ignored, and is suspected to be vastly underreported. Not surprisingly, few women care to describe their ordeals to authorities in stark government detention facilities. And if they do, it’s often as they’re already being deported back across the border–sometimes back into the very situations where the assaults occurred.

This grim scenario played out in early May, when three women–ages 16, 17 and 20–reported having been raped by masked men. A few days later, two more women were found alive but badly beaten near Arivaca, south of Tucson. That same week, yet two more women reported having been raped. The reports didn’t slow deportation proceedings against them.

Further complicating matters, it’s often difficult to determine whether the assaults occurred on U.S. soil or in Mexico. But such details probably matter little to the victims. Civilian border-watchers tell of hearing these women’s cries.

“I thought the wailings we heard at night were the coyotes barking at the moon,” one volunteer told The Washington Times. “I didn’t know until later that those sounds were the cries of women being raped in the Mexican desert, some less than 100 yards away from the border. There was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it.”

The rapists are known to hang women’s bras and panties from tree limbs as trophies.

[h/t to Ann at Feministing].