HRW Report Details Torture of Women Political Prisoners in Myanmar

Women held as political prisoners in Myanmar have endured torture, sexual violence, unsanitary conditions and denials of medical care that put their lives at risk, Human Rights Watch said, calling for their immediate release.

The country has been gripped by civil war across much of its territory since the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

The rights group based its findings on interviews conducted in 2025 and 2026 with 17 former female political prisoners — among them activists, journalists, health workers and aid workers held in 11 interrogation centres and prisons — as well as three family members and four lawyers and advocates.

The women described beatings with sticks, chains, metal pipes and slingshots. They also reported electric shocks, sexual violence, cigarette burns, prolonged stress positions and weeks or months in solitary confinement.

Citing the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which tracks arrests and casualties under the authorities, the report said nearly 6,600 women and 640 children have been detained for political reasons since the takeover. It added that 43 women political prisoners and their children were among 290 political prisoners who died between 2021 and 2026, according to Myanmar Prison Witness.

"Women who have been detained as political prisoners in Myanmar paint a deeply disturbing picture of a prison system in which suffering and neglect are both deliberate and routine," Bryony Lau, the group's deputy Asia director, said in the report. "The women face layers of injustice, from arbitrary arrest to torture and mistreatment in detention, to unrelenting fear and trauma following release."

One woman arrested in 2021 while three months pregnant was beaten and subjected to electric shocks during interrogation even though the authorities knew of her condition, leaving her with chronic pain, the report said. She was held in a storage room with nine other pregnant women, sleeping on a concrete floor among used medical masks and gowns.

"There was no ultrasound, so there was no way to estimate the due date," she told the rights group. "My water broke at midnight, but the (hospital) referral letter only arrived at 10 a.m. Chains were put back on my feet right after the delivery."

About 125 women political prisoners were detained while pregnant or with their children, the report said, citing the Women's Organization of Political Prisoners.

Women also faced sexual humiliation or assault, including invasive body searches carried out in a manner and at a frequency suggesting an intent to humiliate rather than any legitimate security purpose. One former prisoner held at Insein prison in northern Yangon, the country's largest city, and at Daik-U prison in the lower-central Bago region said guards coerced some women into sexual activity in exchange for medicine or other necessities.

Human Rights Watch called on Myanmar's military authorities to release all women political prisoners, including Suu Kyi, and their children, and to end torture and other mistreatment in detention.

The allegations could not be independently verified, and a spokesperson for the military-backed government was not immediately available for comment.

Rights groups have documented allegations of torture and sexual violence in Myanmar's detention facilities since the military takeover. In August last year, a U.N.-backed investigator said his team had found significant evidence of "systemic torture" in the country's detention centres, including electric shocks, strangulations, gang rape and the burning of sexual body parts over a one-year period between 2024 and 2025.